But at ground level, pressed against the interior face of those walls, lie the low stone outlines of a cluster of clochans, the beehive-shaped dry-stone dwellings that once sheltered people within the fort's protection. What makes these particular remains quietly puzzling is not their age but their absence: by the time scholars came to record them properly, they were already gone, cleared away before anyone thought to ask why.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the 1830s and drawing on the observations of local informants and travelling scholars, described several clochans built against the interior wall, adding the dispiriting note that they were all destroyed. By 1895, the antiquarian T. J. Westropp recorded that they had been cleared out, a phrase that points toward the reconstruction works carried out by the Board of Works in the late nineteenth century. Such clearance was not unusual during that period; well-meaning tidying of ancient monuments frequently removed exactly the kind of accumulated domestic evidence that later archaeologists would most have valued. What survived the clearance are foundations: at least ten structures in total, including fragmentary remains near the entrance on the north side, a near-complete penannular, or almost-circular, drystone structure measuring roughly four metres by three point eight metres in the north-west quadrant, and a tightly grouped cluster of seven conjoined structures, with diameters ranging from two point five to four point five metres, pressed together in the south-west corner of the interior. The picture they suggest is of a densely occupied domestic space, families or a small community living inside the shelter of the fort's enormous walls.