What survives there is ambiguous almost by design: a collapsed enclosure wall running SW-NE across an interior space, a single upright slab that may once have marked an entrance, and a spread of fallen stone that could indicate the remains of a hut site. Could, and may, and might; the archaeology here deals in careful probabilities rather than certainties.

The place is known in Irish as Fothair na Manach, meaning roughly "the monastic land" or "the monks' retreat", and that name alone carries a suggestion of ecclesiastical purpose. Tradition links the site to St. Brendan, the sixth-century navigator saint who is said to have founded a monastery here and, in some accounts, to have rested in this valley before setting out on his famous sea voyage into the Atlantic. Whether any physical trace of that early monastery underlies what is visible today is impossible to say with confidence. What complicates the picture further is that, despite the valley's formidable remoteness, local records suggest it was still home to three or four families at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The relationship between any early medieval remains and that later habitation has not been untangled, and the present form of the enclosure may owe as much to those nineteenth-century occupants as to any monastic community centuries before them.

The site sits within an enclosure whose interior was divided by a wall, the collapsed remains of which still cross the space in a broadly SW-NE alignment. The spread of rubble to the south-east of the probable entrance slab is what archaeologists tentatively identify as the hut site itself. In a place this remote, even reaching the enclosure requires a determined approach, and the difficulty of access has arguably done as much to preserve the ambiguity of the site as the passage of time itself.