What makes the group quietly puzzling is what the earliest Ordnance Survey maps show: the structures placed inside a circular enclosure, labelled simply as "Fort" on the Fair Plan, the large-scale manuscript maps that accompanied the first edition OS surveys in the nineteenth century. That label suggests something more formally defensive or enclosing was once recognised here, even if little of it is obvious on the ground today.

The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1899, recorded a diameter of 37 metres for the enclosure, which raises the possibility that the site was originally a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort in which a circular dry-stone wall enclosed a farmstead or small settlement. The individual structures inside are clocháns, the corbelled dry-stone beehive huts associated with early Christian monastic and agricultural use throughout this part of Kerry. The local Irish name for the group, Clochán an Ardáin, reflects exactly that: clochán being the word for such a hut, and ardán meaning a small height or prominence. The Dingle Peninsula has a particular concentration of these remains, and this site, though less visited than some, fits into a broader pattern of early settlement across the higher ground above the sea.