That is narrower than a standard sheet of A4 paper turned on its long edge, and whoever passed through it regularly was either very slight or very determined. The island itself, the northernmost of the Blasket group, sits four miles off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula and is entirely encircled by sea-cliffs, its 241 acres tilting upward from the relatively sheltered south-east toward a high point of 573 feet on the north-west side. The northern half of the island holds no trace of human settlement at all, and even in the southern half the land is thin-soiled and rocky. It is a place that does not encourage casual habitation.

The settlement here is associated with St. Brendan, the sixth-century monk and navigator whose name is attached to several remote and wind-scoured sites along the Kerry coast. Within the enclosure that defines the settlement, a second structure survives built hard against the inner face of the northern wall. Internally it measures roughly 1.5 by 2.18 metres, with a standing height of just over a metre, which means that whoever used it could not stand upright inside. The walls combine upright stone slabs with drystone infill packed into the gaps between them, and the roof is formed from flat flags laid across the top. The whole thing has the quality of something built with great care under considerable material constraint, which is more or less the condition of anyone attempting to live permanently on a cliff-bound Atlantic island. The site was documented as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne.