Early antiquarians, following a description published by Smith in 1899, took it for the ruins of an anchorite cell, the kind of cramped stone dwelling associated with early Christian hermits who sought lives of solitary contemplation at the edges of settled communities. Official surveys in 1992 and 1997 cautiously retained that idea, classifying it as a possible clochan, the beehive-shaped dry-stone hut common in early medieval Irish monasticism. The structure is barely room-sized, roughly 1.78 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, and its entrance narrows so dramatically that at its tightest point it is only 13 centimetres wide, which would make it an extraordinarily awkward door for any permanent dwelling.

The more persuasive reading, put forward by Manning in 1987, is that the wall was never a habitation at all, but was built specifically to shelter a bullaun. A bullaun is a boulder or stone with one or more rounded depressions ground into its surface, almost certainly by human hand, and these features are found throughout Ireland in association with early ecclesiastical sites; their precise function is debated, but they have long carried devotional significance. Protecting such a stone with an enclosure wall would make a different kind of sense than housing a hermit. The walling itself is a mixture of re-used dressed stone and rubble, which suggests the builders were working with material salvaged from an earlier structure, possibly something more substantial that once stood nearby. A cross-inscribed stone sits on top of the wall directly opposite the entrance, and a thorn bush grows close to the wall in the south-east corner, the kind of detail that tends to accumulate quietly around sites that have held local significance for a long time. It is the presence of that re-used cut stone that eventually shifted the official classification away from clochan and towards something more honestly descriptive: architectural fragments, the term acknowledging that the wall is itself assembled from the remnants of something else whose original form is no longer recoverable.