It is not large; roughly five metres across and less than a metre high as it survives today. What makes it quietly remarkable is the method of its construction and the degree to which it has endured.

The hut is built in corbelled drystone, a technique in which flat stones are laid in overlapping horizontal courses, each one projecting slightly inward over the one below, so that the walls gradually lean together without the use of mortar or any binding material. It is one of the oldest and most self-sufficient building methods known in Ireland, requiring only the careful selection and stacking of local stone. The walls here are around 0.8 metres thick, and the entrance, splayed outward to allow easier passage and perhaps to manage light and draught, faces roughly east-north-east. The site is recorded in the Iveragh Peninsula archaeological survey compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the remarkable density of early remains across this part of Kerry. The Iveragh Peninsula, which takes in the Ring of Kerry, is one of the most archaeologically layered landscapes in the country, its uplands and river valleys preserving structures that lower-lying, more heavily farmed ground has long since lost.

The forestry plantation that now surrounds the site makes it harder to spot from a distance and gives it a somewhat sheltered, half-forgotten quality. Visitors approaching the southern slopes of Collybeg should be prepared for the usual difficulties of navigating plantation ground, where tracks can be obscured and the canopy closes in quickly. The hut itself, at under a metre in surviving height, will not announce itself from afar, but the thickness and precision of its drystone walling are apparent close up.