Or perhaps a sheepfold. The two are not the same thing, and the confusion between them is telling. When surveyors came to investigate, they could not find the structure at all.

The discrepancy goes back to the Ordnance Survey's second edition maps, which recorded the feature as a sheepfold rather than a prehistoric or early medieval hut site. Whether an earlier surveyor misidentified the remains, or whether the structure was always a relatively modest agricultural enclosure that accumulated an inflated classification somewhere along the way, is impossible to say now. What is clear is that the plantation forestry that covers this part of the peninsula has made the question effectively unanswerable on the ground. Dense commercial planting has a habit of swallowing low earthworks and stone footings whole, compressing them under root systems and obscuring them beneath decades of accumulated debris. Archaeological survey work on the Iveragh Peninsula, published in 1996 by Cork University Press, catalogued the site but could not resolve what it actually was or confirm its survival.