Known as Cathair na Maoilinne, it was once a substantial oval enclosure, something in the order of 62 metres by 43 metres, containing thirteen tiny stone chambers, or clochans, the corbelled dry-stone cells associated with early monastic and settlement activity along the western Irish seaboard. The smallest of these chambers measured just 1.29 metres in diameter, barely enough to lie down in. Some were circular, some rectangular, some D-shaped in plan, and two pairs were conjoined. None exceeded 2.66 metres at their widest point. That such a concentration of miniature structures once occupied this rough pastureland, overlooking one of the most dramatically shaped coastlines in the country, makes it easy to imagine a community arranged in careful, almost cellular order within its stone walls.

When the archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, the enclosure and its chambers were still legible enough to be described in reasonable detail. By the time J. Cuppage surveyed the Dingle Peninsula for the Corca Dhuibhne Archaeological Survey, published in 1986, the picture had changed considerably. What remained was an ill-defined area of roughly 40 metres in diameter, its southern side marked by a faint bank of earth and stone, its northern side by a low scarp between half a metre and one metre high. Of the thirteen chambers, only three mounds of collapsed stone in the north-western quadrant survive. To the south of the main enclosure, however, a rock shelter, measuring 4 metres by 2 metres internally and partly formed from outcropping rock, remains extant, along with a short run of walling nearby that may represent the northern side of an additional clochan. These southern remnants, where natural rock and human construction blur together, give a sense of how people here worked with the landscape rather than imposing on it.