This is the Slievemore Deserted Village, one of the largest and most legible abandoned settlement clusters in Ireland, where perhaps eighty or more dwellings survive in various states of ruin, their gable ends still standing against the Atlantic weather.

The village was not emptied in a single catastrophic moment. Evidence suggests it was used as a booley settlement, meaning families would move their livestock up to the mountain pastures in summer and return to the coastal lowlands at Dooagh and Dugort in winter, a practice known in Irish as booleying. This seasonal pattern of transhumance was common across Ireland and Scotland for centuries. The Famine of the 1840s disrupted that rhythm permanently, and by the latter half of the nineteenth century the mountain village had been abandoned to year-round settlement. Some of the structures may have much older origins, with traces of earlier occupation on the hillside predating the cottages that are visible today, and a nearby megalithic tomb indicates that people have been drawn to this landscape for millennia.

The village runs roughly east to west below the mountain's ridge and is accessible on foot from the road near Keel. The ground can be soft and uneven, and the site is fully open to the elements, so the experience of walking through it changes considerably with the weather. The cottages are unfenced and unmanaged in any formal sense, which means the place retains a quality of accidental preservation rather than curated heritage.