The settlement is one of the largest and best-preserved deserted villages in Ireland, a place where the outline of an entire community, its houses, field boundaries, and lazy beds, the ridge-and-furrow pattern left by spade cultivation, remains legible in the landscape without much effort of imagination.

The village is thought to have been occupied from at least the early modern period, though the site sits within a landscape of human activity stretching back through the Bronze Age and beyond, with megalithic tombs and ancient field systems on the same mountain suggesting continuous or repeated settlement over millennia. The cottages that survive most visibly date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The community that lived here was not simply swept away in a single event; the pattern appears more complicated, involving seasonal migration known as booleying, where families moved their cattle to upland grazing in summer and returned to coastal lowlands in winter, as well as the longer disruptions of the Great Famine of the 1840s and subsequent population decline. By the late nineteenth century the village had effectively been abandoned as a permanent residence.

The site sits above the road that runs along the north of Achill Island, and the cottages are visible from some distance against the open hillside. The ground is uneven and the approach involves rough terrain, so sturdy footwear is useful. The scale of the village only becomes apparent once you are walking among the structures; from a distance the sheer number of individual dwellings, stretching for several hundred metres along the slope, is easy to underestimate.