The lintelled roof over the shelter, a horizontal slab laid across upright stones to form a low covered space for young animals, turns out to conceal something earlier: a drystone, roughly circular structure that predates it, its original purpose uncertain but its form consistent with early habitation or seasonal use in the upland landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula.

The site sits in poor mountain pasture high above Ballinskelligs Bay, a stretch of water on the south-western edge of Kerry that has shaped the lives of communities on the Iveragh Peninsula for centuries. The circular drystone form, walls built without mortar by fitting stones together, is a construction method with deep roots in the Irish uplands, used variously for shelters, huts, and small enclosures across many periods. Whoever built it and in what era remains unclear, but later farmers evidently found the fabric useful, incorporating it into their own working landscape. A rectangular sheepfold, also built against a rock-face to the north, completes the picture of a patch of rough ground that has been worked and adapted across generations, each use leaving its trace on top of the last.