The Irish name, rendered in Gothic script on Ordnance Survey maps from 1839 onwards, translates roughly as Cliff House, which is apt: the site is less a monument than a room assembled around existing rock. What was once catalogued as the site of a prehistoric chamber tomb turns out to be something more improvised and more lived-in, a natural overhang reinforced over time into a functioning shelter.

The structure as it stands combines geology and construction in roughly equal parts. A rectangular boulder provides the roof, supported on its eastern side by a second large stone. Drystone walling, built without mortar, runs along the south and west to enclose a roughly subrectangular chamber roughly four metres deep and between two and three and a half metres wide. Rough steps lead through a low gap in the walling into an interior where the ground has been levelled and a flagged floor laid down. A stone-lined fireplace sits against the western wall. On a rock shelf inside the chamber, a single cupmark is visible: a shallow, deliberately carved depression of a type associated with Neolithic activity in Ireland, suggesting the site may have attracted human use long before anyone thought to build walls around it. The fireplace is thought to date to the 1840s, possibly connected to work on the nearby Kylemore estate. The shelter also carries the local name Scailp Johnny, after Jonnie Gibbons, who retreated to this area following the collapse of the 1798 rebellion. That uprising, part of a broader United Irish movement with French support, ended badly across the country, and Connacht saw some of its most concentrated aftermath. Whether Gibbons built the fireplace, adapted existing walls, or simply sheltered beneath the boulder as others had done before him, the place absorbed his story the way it had absorbed everything else: quietly, and without much fuss.