That combination, a settlement and a graveyard sharing the same footprint, is not unheard of in early Irish archaeology, but it remains unsettling in the way such overlaps tend to be. The enclosure itself is oval in outline, a shape common to early medieval settlement sites across Ireland, where a roughly circular or egg-shaped earthen boundary defined the limits of a farmstead or small community.

The site was recorded in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne Archaeological Survey of the Dingle Peninsula, compiled by J. Cuppage, and it appears there under the number 1552. The survey covered the broader Ballyferriter area, a part of west Kerry with an exceptionally dense concentration of early remains, from promontory forts to beehive huts to ogham stones. Within the enclosure at Ulaidh an Draghbháil, the possible hut sites suggest the kind of low, corbelled or timber structures associated with early occupation, though the word "possible" in the original description does important work here. These are eroded, ambiguous remains, not the clearly resolved stone footprints found at more celebrated sites nearby. The graves, similarly, are tentative in the record, their presence inferred rather than confirmed by excavation.