It is a small thing, easy to walk past, but it belongs to a place layered with competing histories, monastic, legendary, and domestic, none of which quite resolves into the others.

The valley is known as Fohernamanagh, or Fothair na Manach in Irish, a name that translates roughly as the terraced land of the monks. The ecclesiastical suggestion in that name is reinforced by a longstanding tradition associating the site with St. Brendan, the sixth-century navigator-monk whose legendary sea voyage in search of a promised western land became one of the most celebrated stories of early Irish Christianity. Local tradition holds, as recorded by O'Donoghue in 1895, that Brendan founded a monastery here, and An Seabhac, writing in 1939, noted a separate account placing Brendan in the valley as a sojourner before he set out on that famous voyage. The remoteness of the location fits comfortably with what is known about early Irish monastic practice, which often sought out wild, marginal places as sites of prayer and retreat. Yet the same valley was reportedly home to three or four farming families at the start of the nineteenth century, according to Power, writing in 1923, and it is genuinely unclear how much of what survives on the ground today reflects that more recent habitation rather than anything earlier. The small circular hut foundation, set apart upslope and to the south of the main cluster of structures, is just one of several unclassified remains scattered across the valley, each one sitting in that same ambiguous space between the early medieval and the post-medieval, between the sacred and the simply practical.