It does not look like much at first glance, which is precisely what makes it interesting. The structure is either a clochan or something else entirely, and nobody has yet settled the question.

A clochan is a small, dry-stone building of early medieval Irish origin, typically corbelled, meaning the walls curve inward and overlap until they close at the top without the need for mortar or timber. When inspectors visited in August 1984, what they found was a spread of loose stone roughly three metres by two metres, with only faint traces of wall-facing surviving along the southern side. Subsequent planning of the site produced slightly larger external dimensions, 6.45 metres north to south and 4.73 metres east to west, suggesting the original footprint was more substantial than the rubble implied. The further complication is that Kuijt and colleagues, writing in 2010, raised the possibility that the structure might instead be a leacht, a type of low, rectangular stone monument associated with early Christian devotional practice, sometimes marking a grave or a place of prayer. A dilapidated leacht and a ruined clochan can, it turns out, look remarkably similar once the centuries have done their work. The structure sits within the eastern half of a broader ecclesiastical enclosure on the island, which at least places it in a context where either interpretation would make sense.