It was built, at some point, as a dwelling or shelter of the kind archaeologists call a hut site, constructed using drystone technique, meaning the walls were assembled from unmortered stone, relying entirely on careful placement for their stability. One of its more unusual features is a semi-subterranean wall chamber, a recess or cell built partly below ground level within the body of the wall itself, a detail that hints at a more considered original design than the structure's current battered appearance might suggest.

The hut is roughly circular and modest in scale, measuring approximately 3.8 metres by 2.1 metres. At some stage after its original use ended, it was taken over for agricultural purposes and converted into a sheepfold. The conversion was not gentle; the structure was severely modified in the process, and a lamb shelter was built into the southern wall, the kind of low niche familiar from working hill farms across Kerry and the wider west of Ireland. This layering of uses, an ancient stone shelter repurposed as a fold, is common enough on the Iveragh Peninsula, where the uplands were grazed continuously across many centuries and older structures were simply absorbed into the working landscape wherever they were useful. The hummock it sits on lies about 500 metres upslope from another recorded site in the same area, suggesting this part of Tooreenmore preserves a broader scatter of early activity rather than a single isolated feature.