The settlement is known as the Deserted Village, and what makes it quietly unsettling is not simply its abandonment but the layered nature of that abandonment. The ruins visible today date largely from the nineteenth century, but the site sits within a much older landscape of field systems and habitation traces that suggest people have been living, farming, and moving through this hillside for thousands of years.

The nineteenth-century cottages are the most legible part of the site. They were associated with a practice known as booleying, a seasonal form of transhumance in which families moved their livestock to upland pastures during the summer months, occupying temporary or secondary dwellings while the lower ground recovered. Slievemore's village appears to have functioned partly in this way, though some families lived there more permanently. The Great Famine of the 1840s accelerated the decline of such settlements across the west of Ireland, and the population of this part of Achill was devastated. The cottages fell into disuse and were never reoccupied in any sustained way, leaving the structures largely as they were.

The site is accessible on foot from the village of Dugort, with the cottage ruins visible across a wide area of the slope below the mountain's ridge. The broader archaeological landscape around them, including earlier field boundaries and structural remains, rewards a slow walk rather than a quick pass along the main line of buildings.