The shape it describes is a D, roughly 3.2 metres from north to south, with a straight wall running about 7 metres along its northern edge and a narrow entrance gap, less than a metre wide, opening to the north-east. Drystone construction, meaning walls built from dry-fitted stones with no mortar, is one of the oldest building techniques in Ireland, and here the east-west stretch of wall is the best preserved, rising to around 0.7 metres where the bog has not swallowed it entirely.

What makes this hollow on the hillside particularly suggestive is not the hut itself but its setting. It sits within a network of pre-bog field boundaries, meaning the enclosure walls and divisions of a farming landscape that existed before the bog grew over them, preserving the outlines of fields that were worked and walked long before the peat accumulated. The hut occupies a col, the lower ground between two higher points on the ridge, a sheltered position that would have offered some protection from the Atlantic weather that scours this part of south-west Kerry. A second hut site lies roughly 5 metres to the south-east, suggesting this was not a single isolated structure but part of a small cluster, the remnant of a community or seasonal settlement whose fuller extent now lies beneath the bog.