The evidence is slight now, little more than a scatter of leaning and fallen stones and a faint grassy bank, but the care taken in its construction is still legible in the landscape. To compensate for the natural slope, the builders raised the floor slightly on the downhill side and cut into the hillside on the uphill side, a modest feat of practical engineering that left a structure measuring roughly 2.7 metres by 2.6 metres, barely larger than a modern garden shed.

The site sits on the north-western side of a north-east to south-west valley in Rathcool, overshadowed by the slopes of Mount Gabriel to the north-west and a rocky ridge to the south-east. These are not gentle surroundings; this is rough hill pasture, exposed and uneven, the kind of ground that tends to swallow ancient remains quietly over centuries. The hut itself, a circular form defined by partially exposed stones, belongs to a wider pattern of upland habitation that recurs across the Cork landscape, though at what period this particular example was occupied is not recorded. What is noted is that a second hut site of the same general type lies just 25 metres to the south-east, suggesting this was not a solitary shelter but part of some small cluster of activity on the hillside, however temporary or seasonal that activity may have been.