It is compact to the point of intimacy, with an internal diameter of just 2.8 metres, making it closer in scale to a large wardrobe than to any room a modern person would recognise as habitable. The walls themselves, roughly three quarters of a metre thick, may preserve traces of corbelling, a technique in which courses of stone are laid so that each one projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing off the roof without the need for timber or mortar.

The hut sits only three metres to the north-west of a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure common in early medieval Ireland, typically circular and built to define and protect a farmstead or small settlement. That proximity is almost certainly deliberate. Structures like this one, clustered just outside or immediately beside a cashel, are often interpreted as ancillary buildings, places for storage, for sheltering animals, or occasionally for sleeping. The relationship between the two here at Fanygalvan suggests the site was once part of a small, organised complex rather than an isolated curiosity. The stonework of the hut and the cashel together speak to a period when this part of Clare was being carefully, if modestly, settled and managed.