What was once a substantial early settlement, known as Cathair na Maoilinne, has been reduced to little more than a scatter of stone mounds and a barely legible earthwork. The peculiarity of the place lies less in what survives than in what the earlier record tells us was once there: thirteen remarkably small stone chambers, or clochans, clustered within a single oval enclosure. A clochan is a type of dry-stone corbelled hut, often associated with early Christian monastic or hermitic settlement in the west of Ireland, and the examples here were extraordinarily compact, none exceeding 2.66 metres in their widest dimension and the smallest measuring just 1.29 metres across.

When the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister visited and recorded the site in 1899, the enclosure still read clearly as an oval stone-walled structure measuring 62 metres by 43 metres. Inside it, the thirteen chambers varied in plan, some circular, some oval, some rectangular, and some D-shaped, with two conjoined pairs among them. A rock shelter and a possible further clochan lay about 14 metres to the south. By the time J. Cuppage carried out the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, published in 1986, the picture had already deteriorated considerably. Today the enclosure survives only as an ill-defined area of roughly 40 metres in diameter, its southern edge marked by a faint bank of earth and stone, its northern edge by a low scarp no more than a metre high. Of the thirteen chambers, only three shapeless mounds of stone remain, gathered in the north-western quadrant.

The rock shelter to the south of the enclosure is among the more legible features still on the ground. Measuring 4 metres by 2 metres internally, it is formed partly by a ruined wall and partly by natural outcropping rock. Just to its east, a short run of walling, 1.6 metres long and 0.6 metres high, may represent what is left of the north side of one of the clochans. It is a site where the archaeology has to be read against the grain of slow collapse, and where the contrast between Macalister's careful nineteenth-century description and the present scatter of stones gives a quiet measure of how quickly such places can dissolve back into the hillside.