The uncertainty is almost the point. Inishvickillane, covering 199 acres of Atlantic rock, holds an Early Christian monastic settlement on the eastern slopes of a prominent rocky bluff at the island's south-eastern tip, and somewhere within that complex, according to several historical accounts, there once stood a beehive hut, the kind of small corbelled stone structure that early Irish monks built without mortar, stacking flat stones inward until they met at a point overhead. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs and the OS maps also recorded a square hut. Whether these refer to one structure or two, and precisely where either stood, remains unresolved.

What survives on the ground, a little north of the oratory, is a hollow measuring roughly 1.9 by 2.6 metres and about 0.4 metres deep, set against a rocky ridge. Between this depression and the rock face is a roughly circular area about 3 metres in diameter, defined partly by the natural rock face, partly by loose boulders, and partly by low, rough walling. It is a configuration that could suggest a former structure, though the area appears to have been disturbed in recent times, and no firm conclusion has been drawn. The archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published by J. Cuppage in 1986, documented this ambiguity without resolving it, and it has remained unresolved since. There is something appropriate about that, given the island's remoteness and the difficulty of ever reading Early Christian remains on a wind-scoured rock this far out to sea.