No rooflines, no doorways, no clear sense of entry or exit, only the faint geometry of walls sinking back into the earth and the slight rise of platforms where floors once were. What makes the place quietly unsettling is precisely this absence of drama. It does not look ruined so much as simply erased, the kind of erasure that accumulates over centuries rather than announcing itself.

Oughtmama sits within a large ecclesiastical enclosure that contains three early medieval churches, a site of considerable religious significance in the Burren. The deserted settlement lies about 45 metres east of the most easterly of those churches, and the two Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1840 and 1921 both name it plainly as 'Oughtmama Town', suggesting that the memory of a functioning settlement was still legible to surveyors even as the physical remains were diminishing. By 1996 it was formally classified as a deserted settlement. Three houses survive in a row, each oriented northeast to southwest. The northernmost is the best preserved, with internal dimensions of roughly 10.4 metres by 4.5 metres and walls that still rise as much as 0.8 metres in places. A window embrasure survives on the east wall, narrowing from an internal width of 1.4 metres toward the outside, a detail that gives a rare sense of what the interior light might once have been like. The two houses further south are considerably more reduced, surviving mainly as earthen platforms defined by low scarps rather than standing walls.

The site is reached by orienting yourself from the churches rather than from any obvious path to the houses themselves. The three platforms are arranged in a line running south from the best-preserved structure, each a little more worn than the last, the southernmost little more than a slight change in ground level with a short stretch of double-faced walling at its eastern edge. A double-faced wall is simply one built with two parallel outer faces and a rubble core, as opposed to a single skin of loosely stacked stone. Even knowing what to look for, it requires some patience to read the landscape here.