What you are looking at, if you know where to look, is the ghost of a settlement called Cathair na Maoilinne: once a substantial oval enclosure containing thirteen tiny stone chambers, each so small that the largest measured barely two and a half metres across and the smallest less than one and a half metres in diameter. These are clocháns, the beehive-shaped dry-stone cells associated with early monastic and hermitic life along the western seaboard of Ireland, and the fact that so many were packed into a single enclosure suggests a community rather than a solitary retreat.

When the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, the oval enclosure still measured 62 metres by 43 metres and the chambers, though ruinous, were distinguishable in various forms: circular, oval, rectangular, and D-shaped in plan, including two conjoined pairs. Some 14 metres to the south lay a rock shelter and what may have been a further clochán. By the time J. Cuppage documented the site for the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey published in 1986, significant deterioration had already occurred, and the picture today is considerably reduced from even that. The enclosure boundary survives only as a faint earthen bank on its southern side and a low scarp to the north. Of the thirteen chambers, just three shapeless mounds of stone remain in the north-western quadrant of the site. The rock shelter to the south is still present, measuring four metres by two metres internally, partly bounded by a collapsed wall and partly by natural outcropping rock, with a short stretch of walling nearby that may represent the northern face of one further clochán.

The site sits in rough pastureland, and the visible remains are genuinely subtle, amounting to little more than gentle undulations in the ground and a scatter of loose stone. The comparison between Macalister's 1899 account and what can be seen now is itself instructive, offering a compressed view of how quickly unprotected field monuments can dissolve into the landscape over the course of a century.