They are officially recorded as structures of indeterminate date, which is to say that nobody is quite certain what they were for or when they were built. The official classification calls them houses. The writer and cartographer Tim Robinson had a different opinion.

Robinson believed the pair to be a still-house, the kind of discreet, purpose-built complex used for making poitín, the illicit distilled spirit that was produced across rural Ireland for centuries in defiance of excise law. A spring well between the two buildings would have been essential for such an operation, providing a reliable water source for the still and the cooling process. The structures are aligned northwest to southeast, tucked at the eastern end of a terrace roughly eighty metres wide, below a northwest-facing slope. The positioning offers both shelter and a degree of concealment from casual observers. The more southerly of the two buildings, the shorter of the pair, measures 3.5 metres by 2.8 metres internally, with walls up to a metre high constructed from a mixture of double-walling, large blocks, and thin flags laid transversely across natural outcropping rock. A curving, grassed-over stony bank runs from the spring across what would have been the entrance, either a later addition or a deliberate feature to screen activity inside. Both structures share the same entrance width of 0.85 metres and both face east.

The site sits in open country on the Burren fringe, overlooking the dunes that run along the Clare coast. The stonework is low and unassuming, the kind of structure that reads as a collapsed field boundary until you look more carefully at the paired layout, the shared water source, and the logic of the location. Whether Robinson's interpretation is correct remains unverified, but the arrangement of the buildings and the presence of the spring make the poitín theory difficult to dismiss entirely.