Known as Cathair na Maoilinne, the site was originally a large oval stone-walled enclosure measuring some 62 metres by 43 metres, and within it were packed thirteen remarkably small stone chambers. These clocháns, as they are known in Irish, were dry-stone corbelled huts of a type associated with early medieval monastic and hermitic life along the Atlantic seaboard. What makes this particular grouping so striking is their scale: none exceeded 2.66 metres in their widest dimension, and the smallest was just 1.29 metres in diameter, barely large enough for a single person to occupy. They varied in plan, some circular, some oval, some rectangular, some D-shaped, and two pairs were conjoined.

When the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister visited and recorded the site in 1899, the enclosure and its chambers were still legible enough to describe in some detail. By the time J. Cuppage surveyed the Dingle Peninsula in the mid-1980s, the picture had changed considerably. The enclosure itself had become ill-defined, reduced to a faint earthen and stone bank on its southern side and a low scarp, between half a metre and one metre high, to the north. Of the thirteen chambers, only three mounds of displaced stone survived in the north-western quadrant. What does remain more intact is a rock shelter to the south of the main enclosure, measuring four metres by two metres internally and formed partly by a ruined wall and partly by natural outcropping rock. Just east of it, a short run of walling about 1.6 metres long may represent the remnant of yet another clochan.

The site sits in open pasture and the surviving remains are unassuming to the point of near-invisibility. The rock shelter is the most substantial thing left to see, and even that requires some patience to read. The wider landscape context does a good deal of the interpretive work; the position on the slope, with Ventry Harbour below, is consistent with the kind of exposed, deliberately marginal locations that early communities in this tradition tended to choose.