Patrick Pearse, the schoolmaster and revolutionary executed after the Easter Rising, brought pupils from his Dublin school, St Enda's, out to this Irish-speaking district each summer. The Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking region of which this part of Connemara forms a part, was not incidental to Pearse's purposes; it was the point. For him, the west was where the language and its associated culture survived in living form, and putting his students in contact with local storytellers was as much a part of their education as anything taught in a Dublin classroom.

The most vivid account of what those visits felt like comes from Desmond Ryan, a former pupil who accompanied Pearse on a journey to Ros Muc in 1915. Ryan later wrote of the moment the Twelve Pins, the distinctive quartzite mountain range of Connemara, came into view, and how Pearse began pointing across the landscape, naming lakes, mountains, and districts as far as the Joyce Country to the east, which lay, in Ryan's phrase, "under its purple mist." Ryan also recalled long walks and cycle rides through the surrounding countryside, and evenings in which Pearse passed on stories he had gathered from local tellers. The cottage itself did not survive the period intact; its interior was burned during the War of Independence, the conflict that followed the Rising in which Pearse had played so central a role. The building has since been restored and fitted out with an exhibition tracing that history.

The cottage sits in the Ros Muc area of south Connemara, a district that remains Irish-speaking today. The reconstructed interior gives some sense of the modest domestic scale of the place, which makes the intensity of what was planned and taught there all the more striking.