What remains is not a building, not quite a ruin in any conventional sense, but a ruined rock shelter, which is itself the remnant of something already ruined. The site is a kind of archaeological echo, a place recorded precisely because of how little is left of it.

When R.A.S. Macalister visited in 1899 and noted the group of three very ruined clocháns, he was already describing structures in serious decline. Clocháns are dry-stone beehive huts, a form of early monastic or pastoral architecture found in some numbers along the western seaboard of Ireland, particularly on the Dingle Peninsula. They are associated with early Christian hermits and with seasonal settlement, though their precise dates and purposes vary considerably from site to site. By the time Macalister published his observations, these three were already far gone. By the time later survey work returned to the area, even that much was gone, leaving only the rock shelter in its ruined state. The progression from three structures to one degraded feature to, presumably, very little that an untrained eye would identify as archaeological at all, is a quiet illustration of how quickly the built past can dissolve into landscape.