It measures roughly five metres across in both directions, its outline traced by a low bank of earth and stone, and what survives of it is just enough to suggest that someone, at some point, considered this slightly elevated ground worth building on. The date is genuinely unknown.

The structure is described as subcircular, which places it within a broad family of vernacular or prehistoric shelters found across the west of Ireland, though nothing about it pins it to a particular period. What remains is a bank of earth and stone, with traces of an inner stone facing visible at the north-east. This inner facing, where stones were set against the inner edge of the bank to consolidate the wall, hints at a degree of deliberate construction rather than simple accumulation. There is a gap on the southern side that may be an original entrance, though it is impossible to say for certain. The knoll itself is glacial, meaning it was deposited by retreating ice rather than built up by human effort, and whoever chose this spot would have had a modest but real advantage in drainage and visibility over the boggy ground below. The Joyce River townland context places it in a landscape associated with the Joyce family, one of the Tribes of Galway, whose name became embedded in the local geography of Connemara over centuries.