Among its excavated features is a circular hut site on the island's western shore, roughly 3.8 metres in diameter, whose construction reveals a careful layering of thin stone slabs arranged in two concentric arcs set into separate trenches. The outer arc borrowed from the inner wall-face of a pre-existing ecclesiastical enclosure, folding the boundary of a religious precinct directly into the structure of a dwelling. Three large upright stones along the northern side appear to have supported a sod wall, a building technique in which turves rather than mortared stone form the main body of the wall, with the stone kerbing acting as a retaining frame. At the centre of the interior, excavators found a rectangular stone-kerbed hearth.

Four seasons of excavation between 1992 and 1995 uncovered around seventy per cent of the island, and the hut site, known as Hut A, was conserved in 2001 and 2002. The excavators, Marshall and Walsh, noted that its construction closely resembles that of a sod-walled structure found beneath the island's upstanding drystone church, a building interpreted as a possible earlier church. The two techniques appearing together across different structures on the same small island suggests a consistent, localised approach to building in perishable and semi-perishable materials. The island's name adds another layer of ambiguity: Oileán Lócháin may commemorate a saint named Lochán, a figure mentioned twice in the Martyrology of Oengus, a ninth-century Irish martyrological text compiled around AD 800, which lends some weight to an early ecclesiastical connection. Alternatively, the name may simply mean the island of the chaff, a more prosaic but equally plausible reading. There is, as the excavators noted, no historical documentation for the site that would settle the question either way.