"Spital" is a contracted form of "hospital", and the place-name scholars Gwynn and Hadcock, along with Lee, have argued that this small patch of north Cork preserves the memory of a medieval hospital or hospice, the kind of institution that once stood at roadsides to shelter the sick, the destitute, and those with contagious disease. Nothing of the building survives above ground today, but the outline of what stood here was still legible in the landscape well into the twentieth century.

By 1932, when Ordnance Survey field workers visited, the ruin measured roughly fifty-two feet in length and twenty-four in breadth, built of small stones and mortar, and rose only about three feet from the ground. It appears as a rectangular structure on the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps of 1842, 1906, and 1937, though only the 1937 edition labels it "Hospital" by name. Local tradition identified it as a leper hospital, leprosy being a condition that medieval and early modern communities managed largely through segregation and roadside care facilities of exactly this kind. The same tradition recorded that the site had served as a burial ground for unbaptised and illegitimate children, a use consistent with the informal, marginal status such places often acquired after their original function was lost. Local information also mentioned an old fever hospital and a possible chapel in the same townland, and there is a record of a possible church nearby as well. The road immediately to the west of the site was the main Cork to Limerick road until at least 1788, which would explain why a hospital or hospice was sited here; such institutions depended on passing traffic and were typically planted along well-used routes where travellers in need might find them.