It is not much to look at now: a drystone structure, built without mortar in the ancient manner of dry-laid field stone, reduced to a rough ring of collapsed walling about a metre high and roughly three and a half metres across. What makes it quietly worth pausing over is precisely that modesty, the sense of a life or a working routine once contained within those few square metres of stone.

The site was noted by R. A. S. Macalister in 1899, who recorded its oval plan at a time when the walls presumably retained a little more of their original form. Macalister was one of the foremost archaeologists working in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, and his early documentation of sites across the Dingle Peninsula captured details that have since become harder to read on the ground. The hut sits within a landscape that was surveyed more thoroughly in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a project that catalogued the remarkable density of prehistoric and early medieval remains concentrated on this stretch of the Kerry coast. Gleann Fán itself, the valley in question, falls within that broader zone where early settlement left traces at almost every elevation.