It is easy to miss, and that, in a way, is the point. This was not architecture designed to be seen but shelter designed to survive, built by people working with the land's own contours rather than against them.

The cabin is rectangular and modest to a degree that is almost difficult to picture. Its internal length runs to 4.6 metres, its width to just 2.45 metres, and the tallest point, at the western gable, reaches only 1.7 metres. The rear wall, facing north into the slope, is dug so far back that only a single course of stones remains visible at ground level. The front wall rises to about a metre, with a doorway 0.8 metres wide cut into it. A large boulder to the west provides additional shelter from the prevailing wind, and a small stream runs to the south. The whole arrangement suggests someone working through a careful, if desperate, logic: use the hill as insulation, use the boulder as a windbreak, keep water close. Though the structure probably dates to the nineteenth century, this kind of semi-subterranean cabin represents one of the oldest strategies available to the very poor, embedding the dwelling into the earth itself to reduce the amount of building material needed and to trap whatever warmth could be found. It is thought to be the kind of structure that temporary farm labourers might have thrown up, people living at the outermost edge of the rural economy, for whom permanence was neither an option nor a priority.