Beginish, lying between Valencia Island and the Kerry mainland, was once home to a surprisingly dense settlement cluster on its eastern high ground, an area known as Canroe. Spread across its summit and down to the rocky shoreline are the remains of eight houses, fifteen cairns, eight animal shelters, two poorly built structures, and an extensive network of fields and enclosing walls. At the island's western end there is also evidence of iron smelting. The sheer variety of activity compressed into this small space makes Beginish quietly anomalous, less a seasonal outpost than something that once functioned as a working, layered community.

The site was excavated in the early 1950s by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, whose 1956 report remains the primary account of what was found there. Two of the houses, one cairn, and one animal shelter were fully excavated. Among the most telling finds were two roughly built shelters positioned one directly above the other, each associated with a midden, the compressed accumulation of domestic refuse, food waste, and discarded objects that builds up over time and that archaeologists read as a record of daily life. The stratigraphic relationship between the shelters, one sealed beneath the other, indicates at least two distinct phases of occupation at that spot. A fragment of an iron knife of post-Norman type was recovered from the lower of the two shelters, providing a loose terminus for that earlier phase of use and suggesting the site was still inhabited well into the medieval period. At certain low tides, a sand-bar at the island's south-eastern tip connects Beginish to the neighbouring Church Island, a detail that hints at how these small Atlantic islands were once linked into wider patterns of movement and settlement rather than existing in isolation.