Three of them appear to have been built conjoined, sharing walls in the manner of a tight monastic cluster, while the easternmost survives only as a single exposed course of stonework on its eastern side, the rest swallowed by centuries of fallen rubble. The place is known as Fohernamanagh, from the Irish Fothair na Manach, meaning something close to "the wooded hollow of the monks", and the name alone points quietly towards a religious past.

The connection to St. Brendan of Clonfert, the sixth-century navigator whose legendary sea voyage became one of the great stories of early medieval Ireland, runs through local tradition in two distinct forms. One holds that Brendan founded a monastery here; another, recorded by An Seabhac in 1939, suggests he stayed here for a period before setting out on his famous journey across the Atlantic. Neither claim can be confirmed archaeologically, but the combination of a name invoking monks, a tradition linking the site to one of Ireland's most celebrated saints, and an almost wilful remoteness does suggest, at minimum, a place that once drew people seeking deliberate isolation. The valley also turns out to have been home to three or four families at the start of the nineteenth century, which complicates any attempt to read the ruins as purely early medieval, since later occupation may have altered or built over whatever came before.