No trace of settlement, no field boundary, no sign that anyone ever tried to live there. All of the island's human history is compressed into its southern half, and even there it clings to a modest patch of rocky ground above the sea-cliffs, occupying a small field system on an island that barely stretches to 241 acres.

Within that field system sits an Early Christian settlement associated with St. Brendan, and among its components is an irregular enclosure measuring roughly 17.5 metres north to south and 13.8 metres east to west. It is subdivided internally, though the dividing wall may be a later addition rather than part of the original layout. At its north-western corner stands a large clochaun, the term used for a dry-stone corbelled hut of the kind built without mortar, where each course of stone projects slightly inward until the walls meet overhead. A second hut appears to have been attached to the clochaun's southern side; what remains of it now is a spread of collapsed stone with a hollowed centre roughly 3.2 metres in diameter, the outline of a small circular dwelling reduced to rubble. The island rises from under 30 metres along its south-eastern edge to a high point of around 175 metres midway along its north-western side, and the land throughout is rocky with only a thin covering of soil, which gives some sense of the conditions under which this community, however small, chose to settle here. Inis Tuaisceart lies four miles off the western end of the Dingle Peninsula and two and a half miles north of the Great Blasket, isolated enough that the choice to establish a religious settlement here was clearly deliberate.