That number alone is arresting. The hut sites range from about six to eleven metres in diameter, their low limestone-slab walls often encircling natural hollows in the karst pavement, and many appear in tight clusters rather than as isolated structures. What makes the arrangement stranger still is what it lacks: there is no defensive perimeter, no enclosing wall or ditch around the summit as a whole. The hut sites also keep a deliberate distance from two other monuments on the hill, a large cairn in the western half and a multivallate enclosure, a concentric or labyrinth-like feature, in the east. That spatial logic, structures gathered around but not pressing against the ceremonial monuments, has led researchers to suggest the summit served a ritual or social purpose rather than a purely domestic one.

Excavations carried out in April 2016 by Ó Maoldúin and McCarthy opened two trenches, each cutting through a pair of foundations. No artefacts were recovered from either, but the digs did produce something useful: occupation debris preserved beneath a collapsed wall-footing in the first cutting, and what appears to be a hearth at the centre of a structure in the second. Whether the stone footings once supported timber frames, sod walls, or something closer to a tent-like covering remains an open question. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal samples recovered during excavation had not yet been published at the time the fieldwork was reported, so the precise period of use is still unresolved. Comparable clusters of prehistoric house foundations exist at Knocknarea and Mullaghfarna in County Sligo, suggesting this kind of upland, unenclosed settlement grouping was not unique to Clare, even if its scale here is remarkable. A hillfort lies roughly 580 metres to the east on the hill's eastern summit, adding another layer to what is clearly a complexly used landscape. The summit itself measures approximately 600 metres east to west and between 120 and 160 metres north to south, with views extending across Galway Bay and into south-east Galway and north-east Clare.