It is a complete circular corbelled hut, dry-stone construction built without mortar, where each course of flat stones projects slightly inward over the one below until the courses meet at the top to form a self-supporting dome. This one has a lintelled doorway and a window, measures 3.4 metres in diameter and stands 2.56 metres high, with walls 0.8 metres thick. Those proportions put it in the same family of structures as the famous clochán beehive huts that survive in some number on the Dingle Peninsula, though the assessment here is that this particular example is probably relatively modern rather than early medieval.

That qualification matters. The corbelling technique has been used on the Dingle Peninsula across many centuries, from early Christian monastic cells through to farm buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the form alone tells you very little about age. A structure that looks ancient can turn out to be a potato store or a lambing shelter from two hundred years ago, built by someone who knew the old method and had no shortage of flat stone. The site at Márthain was documented as part of J. Cuppage's Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986, a thorough inventory of the antiquities of this part of west Kerry, and it was recorded simply as it stands: complete, functional in form, and unresolved in its precise origins.

What makes this hut quietly interesting is exactly that unresolvedness. It sits next to a dwelling house, which suggests it served some domestic or agricultural purpose in living memory, yet it was considered worth recording alongside the prehistoric field systems and ogham stones of the peninsula. A corbelled hut in good condition, whatever its age, is a working demonstration of a technique that requires no mortar and no timber, only the careful selection and placement of stone, and the fact that this one survives intact is reason enough to take it seriously.