The island that holds it is named for the men who once sought it out, and the building itself is so modest and so overgrown that it reads less as a monument than as an absence, a place that has quietly refused to announce itself.

The oratory was recorded by Hayward in 1987 as a small structure close to the shore, and local tradition connects it directly to Muckross Abbey, the Franciscan friary founded on the shores of Lough Leane in the fifteenth century. According to that tradition, friars from Muckross would come out to this island not to preach or to minister, but to live in solitude, the kind of withdrawal from communal life that had deep roots in early Irish monasticism. An oratory in this context would have been the simplest of prayer spaces, little more than four walls and a roof, built to shelter a single person at prayer rather than to accommodate a congregation. The choice of a small, low-lying island for that purpose was entirely deliberate; physical remoteness was itself considered spiritually significant, a way of placing distance between the monk and the world.