That transient link feels appropriate for a place that seems to exist slightly apart from ordinary time. Spread across the high ground known as Canroe and spilling down to the rocky shoreline, Beginish holds the remains of an early medieval settlement of considerable density: eight houses, fifteen cairns, eight animal shelters, two poorly built subsidiary structures, and an extensive network of fields and walls threading between them. At the island's western end, there is also evidence of iron smelting, suggesting a community engaged in more than subsistence farming and fishing.

The settlement was investigated in the early 1950s by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, who excavated two of the houses, a cairn, and an animal shelter. What he found at the house sites was largely absence: by the time of excavation, the walls had been robbed down to their foundation courses, the stone removed and presumably repurposed elsewhere on the island or beyond. Four of the houses, distributed across the Canroe area, were recorded as part of his survey, two positioned close to the eastern shore, one near the summit, and one on the lower western slope. The robbing of building stone is a familiar story at early medieval sites across Ireland, where later generations quarried earlier structures as a ready supply of worked material, leaving outlines rather than walls and foundations rather than rooms.