The hut is modest in scale, roughly 4.7 metres in diameter, with the surviving lower courses of its drystone wall, built without mortar by laying stones carefully against one another, reaching only about 45 centimetres above the ground. The interior is level, partially choked with rushes, and the whole structure sits on an east-west terrace that would once have offered its occupants a reasonable outlook across the slope below.

What gives the site a particular quiet interest is that it does not stand alone. A second hut site lies just four metres to the north, suggesting this was not the solitary shelter of a single seasonal herder but something more like a small cluster of activity on the hillside. Structures like these are associated across Ireland with a range of periods and uses, from early medieval farming communities to the transhumance practice of booleying, where people moved livestock to higher pastures in summer. The bog cover that now partially obscures the Kealagowlane site has, in its own way, preserved what remains, holding the lower wall courses in place even as it gradually engulfs them.

Walkers on the Beara Way, the long-distance route that threads through this part of west Cork, pass within roughly fifty metres of the site to the south. The hut circle is easy to miss from a distance, its stones barely distinguishable from the general litter of rock on the hillside, but the slight protrusion of the wall above the bog surface becomes visible on closer approach, particularly where the rushes thin out around the perimeter.