The structure was entirely unknown, unrecorded on any historical Ordnance Survey map, until archaeologists moved in ahead of construction work and found it waiting in the rocky pasture forty metres from the north-eastern shore of the lake. It is, in a sense, the most overlooked building on one of Ireland's most archaeologically saturated landscapes.

Archaeologist Rose Cleary recorded the site in 1982 and returned to it in a later synthesis published in 2018. What her team found was a double arc of post-holes, the kind of circular arrangement typical of Bronze Age roundhouses, where vertical timber posts once held up a low-pitched roof and defined the outer wall. The inner arc of posts, spaced roughly 8.5 metres across, is thought to have supported the roof structure itself, while a second concentric arc set three metres further out marked what was likely the external wall, giving an overall estimated diameter of around 13.5 metres, a fairly generous domestic space by the standards of the period. An internal hearth was also identified. Pottery recovered from the post-holes was classified as Class II Bronze Age flat-bottomed vessels, and the assemblage pointed to a date of approximately 1600 to 1400 BC. Burnt animal bone came up alongside it, the ordinary residue of cooking and daily life. The excavation also uncovered, forty metres to the north-west, a separate Food Vessel burial, the term used for a type of Bronze Age interment accompanied by a ceramic vessel, found during the same campaign of work. The immediate surroundings are equally layered: the Early Medieval settlement known as the Spectacles lies 110 metres to the north-north-west, the crannóg of Bolin Island, an artificial or modified island used as a dwelling place, sits 140 metres to the south-west, and a ring cairn crowns Knockfennell Hill some 530 metres to the west-north-west.

The visitor centre at Lough Gur sits directly over the area where the hut site was excavated, so there is nothing visible at ground level today. What makes the detour worthwhile is the wider landscape rather than any single exposed feature. The site makes most sense when understood as one small point in an extraordinarily dense cluster of prehistoric and early historic activity around the lake. Visitors who walk the lakeshore path and look towards Bolin Island, or up towards the ring cairn on Knockfennell, begin to get a sense of how continuously this shoreline was used across millennia. The visitor centre itself provides context for the broader archaeology of Lough Gur, which is useful before attempting to read the landscape independently.