No one has yet pinned down when it was built, who lived there, or how long it stood in use. That ambiguity is itself a kind of signature for Inis Gé Thuaidh, the more northerly of the two Inishkea islands, where the human past has always been difficult to read cleanly.

Inis Gé Thuaidh, sometimes anglicised as North Inishkea, sits a few kilometres west of the Mullet Peninsula in Blacksod Bay. The Inishkea islands were permanently inhabited until 1931, when the remaining community was evacuated following a tragedy in which ten young men from the islands drowned during a sudden storm while fishing. Before that, the islands had been occupied more or less continuously for millennia, and archaeological traces range from early medieval remains to the remnants of a once-active poitín trade. The house recorded here fits somewhere into that long sequence, though precisely where remains unresolved. Structures described as being of indeterminate date are not uncommon in island contexts, where building materials were reused across generations and documentary evidence is thin.