Known as Cathair na Maoilinne, the site is a cathair, a stone-walled enclosure of the kind common across the Dingle Peninsula, but what made it unusual was what lay inside: thirteen tiny chambers, or clochans, the corbelled dry-stone cells associated with early medieval monastic and pastoral life in Ireland. These were not generous spaces. The largest measured no more than 2.66 metres across, and the smallest just 1.29 metres in diameter, barely enough for a person to lie down. Some were circular, some oval, some rectangular, and some D-shaped; two pairs were built conjoined, sharing a wall between them.

When the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, the enclosure still read clearly as a large oval of stone walling, roughly 62 metres by 43 metres, with the chambers distributed within it and a rock shelter and possible further clochan lying about 14 metres to the south. That rock shelter, a natural hollow partly shaped by a ruined wall and partly by outcropping stone, measured 4 metres by 2 metres internally, and a short stub of walling nearby may mark the northern side of yet another small cell. The 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey by J. Cuppage documented the site in detail, but by then decay had already advanced considerably. What survives today is an ill-defined spread of ground roughly 40 metres across, with only a faint bank of earth and stone on its southern edge, a low scarp to the north, and three mounds of collapsed masonry in the north-western quadrant where the chambers once stood. The rock shelter to the south remains the most legible feature on the ground.