The number of huts is not entirely settled, with counts ranging between three and four, a small ambiguity that speaks to the worn and weathered state of the structures rather than any lack of scholarly attention.

What makes the site quietly puzzling is how its interpretation has shifted depending on the source material consulted. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey maps shows the huts sitting within a circular enclosure labelled simply as "Fort" on the Fair Plan, suggesting the cartographers recognised something more organised here than a loose scatter of shelters. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1899, recorded the enclosure as having a diameter of 37 metres, and raised the possibility that the whole arrangement may originally have been a cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled fort typically associated with high-status settlement in early Christian Ireland. The clocháns, or dry-stone beehive huts, that survive within it would fit comfortably within such a context, since cashels frequently contained small corbelled structures used for habitation or storage. The site was recorded in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which brought together a great deal of fieldwork on the extraordinarily dense concentration of early monuments across Corca Dhuibhne.