Clearance cairns are exactly what they sound like, piles of stone gathered from agricultural land and heaped together so that fields could be worked more easily. They are common enough across Ireland, but here on a small island between Valentia and the mainland, their presence is part of something more layered and quietly remarkable.

The settlement complex at Canroe was investigated by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly in the early 1950s, and his excavations, published in 1956, remain the foundation for what we know about the site. The complex is substantial for such a remote location: eight houses, eight animal shelters, two poorly built ancillary structures, and an extensive network of fields and walls spread from the western slope of Canroe over its summit and down to the rocky eastern shoreline. Fourteen of the fifteen cairns cluster on the eastern side of Canroe, with a single example positioned closer to the houses on the west. O'Kelly fully excavated one well-preserved cairn, located 55 metres north-east of House 6. It measured 3.5 metres in diameter and half a metre high. No finds were recovered from it, which is consistent with the clearance interpretation; these were not burial monuments or ritual deposits, simply the residue of people making ground workable. At the western end of the island, separate from the settlement complex, there is also evidence of iron smelting, suggesting that whoever lived here was engaged in more than subsistence farming. At certain low tides, the south-eastern tip of Beginish connects by sandbar to the nearby Church Island, a detail that complicates any sense of these islands as fully isolated from one another or from the broader rhythms of the region.