What makes it peculiar is not its age, which remains unknown, but the fact that the only record of it is a pencil sketch made by a man named Major Aldridge sometime in the mid-twentieth century, and that when researchers went looking for it decades later, in 1995 and again in 2010, they found nothing at all.

Aldridge's sketch, preserved in correspondence files from 1966, shows a structure of modest but deliberate design. The main body was oval, roughly eleven metres east to west and seven metres north to south, defined by a low enclosing wall. On the eastern side, a small rectangular annex projected outward, measuring about four and a half metres by one and a half. At the western end of the main wall, three stones set perpendicular to the wall face appear to mark an entrance. At the centre of the interior, four stones were arranged in a tight rectangular setting, annotated by Aldridge as a hearth; three sides were closed by the stones, the western side left open. The overall impression is of a vernacular structure, spare and functional, of the kind that might have sheltered people or livestock for a season, though no date has ever been assigned to it. The house stood a short distance west of a separate enclosure in the same landscape, and may have been associated with a nearby midden, the accumulated domestic refuse of whoever once lived or worked there.

The dune systems along this stretch of the Mayo coast are famously mobile. Sand shifts, covers, and occasionally reveals, which means the structure Aldridge recorded could be buried rather than gone. It could also be that the low wall he sketched was already on the verge of dissolution when he found it, and that the intervening decades finished what erosion had started. Either way, what survives is the sketch itself, a record of something that was once concrete enough to measure and draw, now reduced to approximate coordinates and an outline on paper.