The whole settlement stretches roughly 300 metres by 275 metres, bounded on either side by streams, and it was entirely invisible to ground-level observers until aerial reconnaissance in July 1970 picked it out from above. The locality has its own name for the place: the sixteen tenants, a phrase that carries more human weight than any official designation.

The regularity of the layout is what makes this site distinctive and, to archaeologists, revealing. Deserted settlements in Ireland come in many forms, but this one lacks the usual markers that help date such places: no church, no castle, no souterrain or other diagnostic feature that would point clearly to medieval origins. Instead, the orderly arrangement of plots along a defined street suggests a planned settlement of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, the kind of landscape produced by landlord reorganisation of rural tenancies in the post-Plantation period. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the 1830s, records three roofed buildings in the area along with a section of the roadway, meaning the place had not yet been entirely abandoned when the surveyors came through. By some point afterward it was, and the fields closed over it.