But the valley it sits in, Fohernamanagh, is described as the most inaccessible settlement on the entire mainland of Corca Dhuibhne, that long finger of southwest Kerry reaching into the Atlantic. The place name itself, Fothair na Manach, translates roughly as "the wooded hollow of the monks", and that name, combined with the sheer difficulty of getting there, is almost the entirety of the evidence that something ecclesiastical once happened here.

Tradition credits St. Brendan, the sixth-century navigator whose legendary sea voyage became one of the great stories of early Christian Ireland, with both founding a monastery at this site and pausing here before setting out on that voyage. These associations were noted by O'Donoghue in 1895 and repeated by An Seabhac in 1939, though neither source offers anything more than inherited local tradition. What complicates any attempt to read the archaeology is that the valley, despite its isolation, was apparently home to three or four families at the start of the nineteenth century, according to Power writing in 1923. The small rectangular structure abutting the enclosure wall at its south-southwest corner may belong to that more recent occupation, or to something much older. The two phases of use are difficult to disentangle, and the ruins do not resolve the question.

The structure itself is slight: an internal space of 3.5 by 1.2 metres, now visible only as tumbled stone following the line of what were once walls. It is the kind of detail that matters precisely because so little else survives to speak for this place. Whether it ever served a monastic community, or sheltered a nineteenth-century farming family, or both at different times, remains genuinely uncertain.