The severe weather of January 2014 stripped back enough of the coastal ground at Knock, in County Galway, to reveal the faint outline of a structure that had apparently gone unnoticed until a researcher walking the shoreline afterwards spotted what remained. What was uncovered sits in a small bay just east of a place known as Cromwell's Barrack, a name that carries its own freight of local memory, and what survives is barely there at all: two short arcs of displaced stone walling, each roughly a metre wide and no more than twenty centimetres high, tracing the western and eastern sides of what was probably a circular hut with an internal diameter of around 3.2 metres.

Circular stone huts of this general form appear throughout Ireland across a very wide span of time, from early prehistoric settlements through to medieval pastoral shelters, and the surviving remains here are too fragmentary to place with confidence in any particular period. The walls have shifted from their original positions, and only the rough geometry of the arc survives to suggest the building's original shape. What gives the site a little more context is its neighbourhood: some twenty metres to the east lie the ruins of a possible 17th-century building, and immediately to the west is the structure recorded as Cromwell's Barrack. Whether the hut predates these neighbours or was in some way contemporary with them is not clear from what the storm exposed.