What you are looking at, or trying to look at, is the ghost of a settlement that once comprised thirteen tiny stone chambers inside a large oval enclosure, each one barely big enough for a person to lie down in. The smallest was just 1.29 metres in diameter. These are clochans, a term for the dry-stone corbelled cells associated with early monastic and hermitic life in Ireland, and whoever built this cluster of them on this exposed Atlantic hillside was not interested in comfort.

When the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, it still had considerable shape and legibility. The oval enclosure measured 62 metres by 43 metres, its stone wall holding thirteen chambers of varying plans, some circular, some oval, some rectangular, some D-shaped, including two conjoined pairs. By the time the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey was compiled by J. Cuppage in 1986, the picture had already changed considerably, and the site known as Cathair na Maoilinne had softened back into the landscape. What survives today is an ill-defined area roughly 40 metres across, bounded on its southern side by a faint bank of earth and stone and on its northern side by a low scarp no more than a metre high. The thirteen chambers have collapsed into three mounds of stone in the north-western quadrant. To the south of the main enclosure, however, a rock shelter survives in more recognisable form, measuring 4 metres by 2 metres internally, partly walled and partly formed by natural outcropping rock, with a short run of walling nearby that may represent the remains of an additional clochan.

The site sits in rough pastureland and requires patience rather than a clear path. The surviving rock shelter to the south of the enclosure is the most legible feature remaining, and it is worth pausing there to consider the scale of what was once arranged across this hillside, thirteen miniature stone rooms facing out over one of the most exposed stretches of coastline in Ireland.