The structure is D-shaped, or thereabouts, measuring roughly eleven metres on its northeast to southwest axis and six and a half metres across, and what remains of its walls has long since collapsed inward into a moss-covered bank of tumbled stone, nowhere rising more than half a metre from the ground. It is the kind of thing that rewards a slow walker more than a purposeful one.

Hut sites of this kind are common enough across the Irish uplands, though their dates are often difficult to pin down without excavation. They represent the most basic unit of early settlement, a single roofed space defined by a stone wall, sometimes associated with seasonal farming activity and sometimes with more permanent habitation. At Noughaval, the picture is complicated slightly by the fact that later drystone walling, the kind of field boundary work that continued in this landscape well into the post-medieval period, has been laid directly over the earlier remains. The eastern side of the structure has been largely removed, probably as later builders quarried the convenient ready-dressed stone. What is left sits quietly beneath the moss, its original function unverified but its presence in the landscape unmistakable once you know to look for it.