The name carries weight, hinting at a connection to the era of Penal Laws, when Catholic priests in Ireland were legally prohibited from practising their faith and sometimes sheltered in remote or inconspicuous structures. Whether that tradition is accurate here is another matter, because the building's date remains entirely unknown, and its construction does not inspire confidence in whoever put it up. Archaeologists describe it plainly as poorly built, its walls roughly coursed rather than carefully laid.

The structure sits in the north-eastern quadrant of a larger enclosure on the Iveragh Peninsula, the broad sweep of South Kerry that reaches out into the Atlantic. Internally it measures 10.6 metres by 5.3 metres, with walls surviving to just over a metre in height and averaging about 0.8 metres thick. An entrance gap on the western side, roughly 0.7 metres wide, is marked by a single upright stone on its northern edge. One detail that has quietly disappeared over time is a small recess that two observers named the Delaps recorded in one of the corners when they visited in 1910. By the time a thorough archaeological survey of the peninsula was carried out in the 1990s, no trace of it remained. Whether it was robbed for stone, collapsed, or was misidentified in the first place is not recorded.