The foundations are poorly defined, barely legible to the eye, yet they were clear enough to be marked on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, that great mid-nineteenth-century effort to fix Ireland's landscape in ink before it changed further. What survives today is less a ruin than a suggestion, the kind of low, grass-grown sill of stone that asks more questions than it answers.

The house is reputed to have belonged to the O'Flaherty clan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a detail recorded by the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, whose meticulous work documenting Connemara's placenames and local memory has preserved fragments of knowledge that would otherwise have dissolved entirely. The O'Flahertys were one of the dominant Gaelic families of west Connacht, their power considerably reduced after the upheavals of the seventeenth century but their presence in the landscape lingering in place associations and oral tradition long afterwards. A rectangular longhouse of this period would typically have been a modest single-storey structure, its walls of unmortared or lightly mortared stone, housing family and sometimes livestock under one roof or in closely adjoining spaces. That such a building sat beside a trackway rather than in an enclosed settlement suggests it may have served a particular function within a working landscape, a waypoint of sorts, though the evidence is too thin to press the point.