It measures roughly five metres by three, its enclosing bank barely half a metre high, and yet the deliberate arrangement of its boulders, including a large stone lining the western side of a narrow entrance gap, marks it out as the work of human hands rather than the slow chaos of coastal geology. Whether it was ever fully roofed, or stood open to the sky as a small enclosure, remains uncertain; the site is recorded as a possible hut-foundation, which is the kind of careful qualification that archaeological work on remote islands tends to earn.

Inishvickillane, or Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, covers 199 acres and lies seven miles south-west of Slea Head, the westernmost point of the Dingle Peninsula. The hut-foundation forms part of a broader Early Christian monastic settlement at the south-east end of the island, a cluster of remains suggesting that monks once chose this exposed Atlantic rock as a place of retreat and prayer. Early Christian monasticism in Ireland frequently sought out precisely such marginal landscapes, islands and cliff-edges and mountain tops, and the Blaskets, scattered far into the ocean beyond the Dingle coast, offered the kind of deliberate isolation that communities of that period valued. The oval hollow lying directly to the east of the structure, measuring three metres by two, may relate to it in some functional way, though its purpose is not recorded. J. Cuppage documented the site in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, and that account remains the basis for what is known about it.