What makes it quietly interesting is its name. Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 onwards label it, in Roman script, as "Hermitage", a word that carries a specific implication: that someone, at some point, chose this place as a site of deliberate withdrawal and solitary religious life.

The OS Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century as a companion to the early Ordnance Survey mapping effort in Ireland, describe the building simply as a "small house (cell)", which places it in a long tradition of monastic anchoritism, the practice of a hermit or anchorite living alone in a modest cell, often attached to or near a burial ground with older religious associations. When surveyors inspected the site in August 1985, they found a roughly rectangular structure measuring approximately 3.2 metres north to south and 2.9 metres east to west, built from roughly cut mortared limestone. The eastern wall was the most intact, surviving to a maximum height of one metre with a thickness of around 0.6 metres; the remaining walls had been reduced to foundation level and were largely buried under ivy and fallen stone. By the time of a follow-up inspection in March 2010, the condition had worsened considerably. The burial ground itself had been heavily poached, likely by livestock, and the area around the hermitage had deteriorated to the point where only scattered stones remained visible.

The 1920 Ordnance Survey map already recorded the structure as being in ruins, so the decay is not recent. What survives now is less a building than a faint outline, a suggestion of walls in a corner of a graveyard that itself belongs to an older, largely unrecorded religious landscape in this part of Galway.