Everything, every field boundary, every structure, every sign that people once tried to make a life here, is compressed into a portion of the southern half. That compression tells its own quiet story about how marginal this land has always been.

Inishtooskert is the northernmost island in the Blasket group, sitting four miles off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula and two and a half miles north of the Great Blasket. The terrain rises steeply from the south-east, reaching a maximum altitude of 573 feet near the middle of the north-west side, and the soil cover throughout is thin over rock. Within the small field system on the southern half lies an Early Christian settlement associated with St. Brendan, a period when monks and hermits favoured the exposed Atlantic islands of this coast for their very remoteness. By 1756 the island appears to have been unoccupied. Then, intermittently through the first half of the nineteenth century, people returned, and by 1838 the Kean family were recorded as living in a large clochaun, a type of dry-stone corbelled structure characteristic of early Irish building. The difficulty, which archaeologists have noted, is that these later inhabitants settled in precisely the same area as the Early Christian community, and appear to have worked the same ground. From surface inspection alone it is not possible to separate one phase from the other, or to say with confidence which walls and field boundaries belong to which era. The clochaun occupied by the Keans in 1838 may preserve something of an early medieval original, or it may not. The landscape refuses to give a clear answer.