The hut is modest even by ancient standards, measuring just 3.7 metres in diameter, and its builders went to the quiet trouble of raising the north-east portion of the interior by roughly 35 centimetres to compensate for the slope and create a level floor. That levelled surface is now obscured by rubble, but the eastern arc of the wall survives in the best condition, its stones still readable beneath the grass cover at around 30 centimetres high and 65 centimetres thick.

What gives the site its particular interest is not the hut itself so much as its context. It sits within a network of relict field boundaries, the ghost of an organised agricultural landscape that once covered this rough hill pasture before the bog crept in and erased most of the evidence. Around 70 metres to the south-west lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, often found near a water source. These sites are extraordinarily common across Ireland and are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though their precise function has been debated; cooking large quantities of meat, brewing, or bathing have all been proposed. The proximity of the hut to the fulacht fia suggests this small patch of Knocknagullion once supported some form of sustained human activity, however seasonal or temporary it may have been, at a time when this boggy hillside looked very different from the rough pasture it is today.