Building, Sceilg Mhichíl, Co. Kerry

This was most probably a guesthouse, a place where visitors could be received and accommodated outside the enclosure of the monastery proper. Its position is deliberate and telling: close enough to offer shelter, yet separate from the monastic community within.

The structure is subrectangular in plan, measuring five metres northeast to southwest by two and a half metres northwest to southeast internally. Its walls are of coursed drystone masonry, the same technique used throughout the island, in which stones are laid without mortar in careful horizontal rows. A doorway, 0.85 metres wide, opens on the eastern side, directly opposite the steps, and a wall-niche, 0.4 metres wide and 0.8 metres deep, is set into the northern wall, functioning essentially as a built-in cupboard. Lying prostrate on the northern wall is a large, undecorated stone cross, known as Dunraven's Cross after the Earl of Dunraven, who recorded it in an engraving published in 1875. That engraving depicts both the cross and the hut together, which gives a useful early record of the structure's condition and confirms the cross had already fallen by that point.