The hut is roughly D-shaped in plan and measures just 2.5 metres long by 1.32 metres wide internally, with walls that incline inward to meet a flagged roof. The entrance, facing southwest, is barely half a metre across. A short unroofed passage leads up to it. Everything about the structure speaks to deliberate, austere economy.

Inis Tuaisceart, the northernmost of the Blasket Islands, lies four miles off the western extremity of the Dingle Peninsula and two and a half miles north of the Great Blasket. Its 241 acres rise from low sea-cliffs on the southeastern side to a maximum altitude of 573 feet roughly midway along the northwest. The land is generally rocky with thin soil cover, and settlement is confined to part of the southern half, where a small field system surrounds an Early Christian enclosure associated with St Brendan. The walls of the hut are described as poor drystone construction, which in archaeological terms means the stones were laid without mortar and without great precision, yet the structure has survived long enough to be recorded and measured. Drystone building of this type was common in early Irish monastic contexts, where small corbelled cells, sometimes called clocháns, were built by monks seeking solitude on the margins of the inhabited world. Whether this hut belongs to that tradition precisely is not stated, but the setting and the settlement association make the connection plausible.

Access to Inis Tuaisceart is not straightforward. The island has no permanent inhabitants and landing depends on sea conditions along a coastline defined entirely by cliffs. The settlement, including this hut, lies within the field system on the southern portion of the island, which represents the only part of Inis Tuaisceart where the ground ever seems to have been considered habitable.