Largely uninhabited since a mass evacuation of its community in 1934, the island carries the particular atmosphere of a place that held a settled human life for centuries and then, abruptly, did not. Among the archaeological features recorded there is an enclosure, a broad category in Irish field archaeology that typically refers to a defined area bounded by an earthen bank, a stone wall, or a ditch, and which can belong to almost any period from the prehistoric to the early modern. Such structures served many purposes, from ritual enclosure to domestic settlement to livestock management, and their very ambiguity is part of what makes them worth attention.

The Inishkea islands have a long record of human activity. Early Christian remains, including a monastic site associated with Saint Colmán, have been identified on the islands, and the area is known to archaeologists as a place where successive layers of occupation sit close to the surface. The community that lived on Inis Gé Theas until the twentieth century kept cattle, fished, and maintained a way of life that had changed relatively little over generations. When they left, following a tragedy in which ten young men from the islands drowned during a sudden storm in October 1927, many of the island's structures were simply abandoned in place. The enclosure recorded here sits within that layered landscape, its precise origins and function as yet unpublished, though its presence alone speaks to a sustained human engagement with this remote Atlantic ground.

The islands are accessible by boat from Blacksod Bay, though crossing times and conditions depend entirely on the weather, and the Atlantic approaches to the Mullet Peninsula are not to be underestimated in any season. The ruins of the former village remain visible on Inis Gé Theas, and the sense of an interrupted ordinary life is tangible in the roofless cottages and small enclosures that survive across the island's low ground.