That, in itself, is the point. A hermitage or cell once stood there, noted as recently as 1837, but by the time anyone thought to look properly, it had been buried beneath a mound of earth and stones piled up by the Trigonometrical Surveyors of Ireland during their mapping work. No apparent trace of the structure survives today, which gives the site an odd double invisibility: a place of deliberate solitude, made more invisible still by the instruments of official survey.

The island's early Christian history is better preserved lower down. A path climbs from the landing place on the north-east shore, a cove known as Coosaneeve, or Cuas na Naomh, meaning roughly "the hollow of the saints," and leads to a terraced oval enclosure containing the remains of an oratory, a burial ground, and a nineteenth-century house built within the same bounds. Outside the enclosure to the south-west lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage, typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. The writer Samuel Lewis, compiling his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837, recorded the hermitage on the summit as "vestiges" even then, which suggests it was already in poor condition before the surveyors added their cairn. Whether the cell predated the enclosure below, or was a later act of retreat further up the hill, is not known.

Getting to Scariff Island requires a boat crossing and some willingness to navigate a working landscape of early ruins. The ecclesiastical enclosure is reached on foot from the landing cove, uphill along a path that connects the island's inhabited margin to its older, quieter centre. The summit, where the hermitage once stood, offers only the view and the knowledge of what the surveyors inadvertently sealed away.