A clochan is a dry-stone corbelled hut, built without mortar by laying each course of stone slightly inward until the walls meet overhead, a technique used in early medieval Ireland most commonly by monks or hermits seeking isolation on the Atlantic fringe. That three once stood here, and that all three were already destroyed by the time anyone thought to write them down, gives the site a quietly melancholy character.

The destruction was noted by R. A. S. Macalister in 1899, who recorded the three ruined clochans at this location, by which point they were apparently beyond meaningful description. Cathair Boilg sits within a landscape extraordinarily dense with early Christian and prehistoric remains, the Dingle Peninsula being one of the more intensively documented stretches of the Irish coastline. The name cathair, meaning a stone fort or enclosure, suggests the clochans may once have formed part of a larger enclosed settlement, the kind of small monastic or secular farmstead grouping that appears repeatedly along this coastline. Whether the enclosure itself survives in any form is not recorded.