It is a corbelled drystone hut, roughly rectangular, measuring just 2.2 metres by 1.7 metres, with an entrance facing east. Corbelled construction, where successive courses of unmortared stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward until the roof closes over itself, requires no cement and no timber, only patient stacking. The result can last for centuries, sometimes millennia, which is part of what makes these small shelters so difficult to date.

What lifts this particular site beyond a simple shepherd's refuge is what lies immediately to its south. Flush against the hut is a second structure, entered through an opening barely half a metre wide, leading into a semi-subterranean chamber around two metres long, its roof formed from flat lintels laid across the drystone walls. This kind of underground or partly buried chamber, dug into the ground and roofed with stone slabs, is a form found across early medieval Ireland, sometimes described as a souterrain, used variously for storage, refuge, or dairy cooling. Here the two structures sit together, the hut above ground and the chamber half-buried beside it, forming a compact pairing that suggests a more considered use of the landscape than casual shelter alone.

The site sits within a working forestry plantation on the upper Carhan river catchment in the Iveragh peninsula, that broad arm of southwest Kerry between the Kenmare River and Dingle Bay. The plantation setting means the structures may be difficult to locate without good local knowledge, and the tree cover can obscure both the approach and the details of the stonework once you are close to it.