What makes the site quietly strange is not its absence alone, but the layers of uncertainty that surround even its former existence: was it a hut, or a house? The question turns out to be unanswerable, and nobody has managed to settle it in over a century of looking.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited the site and recorded it in 1911, describing what he saw as the "faint trace of a ring, 30 feet north and south by about 24 feet," which he cautiously called "probably a hut." Yet on the published plan that accompanied his account, he labelled the same feature a "house site," a small but telling inconsistency. His manuscript plan adds a further detail: the structure appears to have been attached to the western side of an old boundary line running southwards across the promontory, suggesting it was not simply a freestanding dwelling but part of some larger, organised use of the land. The site sits roughly fifteen metres outside and to the north-east of the defences of the Doonagappul promontory fort, a type of enclosure formed where earthen or stone ramparts cut across the narrow neck of a coastal headland, using the sea cliffs on either side as natural boundaries. Even in Westropp's time the northern portion of the oval ring was already gone, eaten away by the cliff, so what he recorded was already a ruin of a ruin. A subsequent geophysical survey, which uses instruments to detect buried features invisible at the surface, found no definite traces whatsoever.