It is poorly preserved, measuring only six metres in length and 3.6 metres in width, with a doorway cut into its north wall. What makes it quietly arresting is a detail that survives against the odds: traces of plaster still cling to the inner face of the south wall. On a windswept island, in a structure that has otherwise largely surrendered to the elements, that fragment of finished surface suggests a dwelling that was, at some point, genuinely inhabited and maintained.

The date of the house has not been firmly established, which is itself telling. Fínis, like many of the smaller islands along this stretch of coast, was home to small farming and fishing communities whose material culture left little in the way of datable evidence. The drystone construction, in which walls are built without mortar, was a technique used across many centuries in the west of Ireland, making it difficult to pin down without excavation. Around the house, a series of stone walls and earthen banks extends to the west and north, suggesting the remnants of field boundaries or enclosures that once organised the land around it. A comparable structure stands approximately 150 metres to the north, hinting that this was not an isolated dwelling but part of a small settled landscape, however modest. The cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, whose meticulous survey of Connemara and the Aran Islands documented places exactly like this, noted the site in his 1985 work.