What makes the site quietly peculiar is its enclosure, which is not really an enclosure in any formal sense. Instead of a single defining boundary wall, the settlement is contained by a combination of natural features, including a large crag to the north-west, a line of boulders to the south, and terraced hillslope revetted with large stones, with drystone walling filling the gaps where the landscape does not do the work itself. The monks, or whoever shaped this landscape, used the terrain as architecture.

Within that roughly defined perimeter, the site divides into three irregular sub-enclosures. The northernmost, measuring roughly 21 metres east to west and 17 metres north to south, holds the oratory, a graveyard, a leacht (a low, cairn-like devotional structure associated with prayer and commemoration), a stone cross, and formerly two cross-slabs and a cross-inscribed ogham stone, a type of early medieval inscription using a system of notched lines along a central stem. A stone font and a stone lamp were once housed inside the oratory itself. The enclosure wall that extends westward from the oratory appears to be a later addition, since it obscures the original external corner of the building at its south-west angle. The island's recorded history is sparse but suggestive: the earliest written reference dates to the early thirteenth century, when a document in the Register of the Hospital of St John the Baptist in Dublin records a deed of gift from one Adam Dundno of a mark of silver owed by Ricardus de Marisc as annual rent for the island. What either man did with it is not known. By 1756 the island was uninhabited, though one or more families lived there intermittently through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

The enclosed fields lying to the east and south of the monastic focus add a further layer of ambiguity. They may be a continuation of Early Christian land management, or they may be the work of those later settlers, and the archaeology does not yet resolve the question. Getting to the island at all requires a nine-mile journey from Dunquin, which means weather and sea conditions will largely determine access, as they always have.