No field boundary, no structure, no sign that anyone ever tried to work or settle that ground. All of the island's evidence of habitation is compressed into the southern half, and even there, at the very core of a small field system, sits something unexpectedly concentrated: a roughly wedge-shaped enclosure, no more than twenty metres across at its widest, containing an oratory, stone crosses, and a leacht. A leacht is a low cairn or platform of stones, typically associated with early devotional practice, and the presence of one here alongside the other elements marks this as a formal Early Christian sacred space, set on a rocky Atlantic island that most people have never heard of.

Inishtooskert is the northernmost of the Blasket group, sitting about four miles off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula and two and a half miles north of the Great Blasket. The island covers 241 acres, ringed entirely by sea-cliffs, with the land climbing from under thirty metres on the south-east side to a maximum of 175 metres roughly midway along the north-west. The soil cover is thin throughout, and the terrain is largely rock. Within this unpromising landscape, the small enclosure is associated with St Brendan, the sixth-century monk and navigator whose cult spread widely across the early Irish church and who is particularly venerated along the Dingle Peninsula. The settlement's precise history is difficult to date closely, but its form, an enclosed monastic precinct with a small oratory and devotional markers, is consistent with the kind of island hermitage communities established by early Irish monks who sought remote, sea-girt places for prayer and ascetic practice.