It is the kind of place where the ground keeps secrets, and occasionally gives them up. In the winter of 2013 and into 2014, a series of severe Atlantic storms stripped back the dunes at the northern end of a bay on the island's western side, and what they revealed was unexpected: the eroded foundations of at least two structures emerging from the dune face, their walls built from drystone boulders, a technique requiring no mortar, relying instead on the careful fitting of stone against stone. One of the structures appears to have been around six metres in width.

The location, at Gooreen, places these remains in a setting that has been shaped by sand and wind for centuries, and where earlier traces of human activity are easily swallowed and just as easily disgorged. Dune systems along the Irish Atlantic coast have long been understood as unstable archives; they accumulate, shift, and erode, sometimes preserving beneath them the outlines of earlier settlements, field systems, or shelters that would otherwise have vanished entirely. The storms of that winter, which caused widespread coastal damage across Ireland, had the incidental effect here of making visible something that had been buried long enough to be forgotten. No date has been assigned to the structures, and their purpose remains unclear, though drystone construction of this kind is found across many periods of Irish prehistory and early history.