Look more closely and the structure reveals an oddity that distinguishes it from many of its kind: the exterior is oval, as is typical of a clochan, yet the interior has been built to a rectangular plan, measuring roughly 5.5 metres in length and 3.6 metres in width. A clochan is a type of early Irish dry-stone or mortared hut, often associated with monastic or hermitic life, built using a corbelling technique in which courses of stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing to form a roof without any timber or mortar. The geometry here, oval outside and rectangular within, suggests a deliberate and somewhat unusual piece of thinking by whoever laid the original walls.

The structure is now ruinous, though not entirely lost. Doorways are set into both the north and south walls, facing one another across the interior, and the eastern portion of the corbelled roof remains largely intact where the rest has collapsed. At the base of the walls, traces of plaster are still faintly visible, a detail that hints at a level of finish and perhaps permanence that purely functional field structures rarely received. The placename Ceathrú an Teampaill, meaning the quarter or townland of the church, suggests this corner of Inis Meáin carried some ecclesiastical significance, and the clochan may belong to that broader tradition of early Christian settlement on the island. The site was recorded by Tim Robinson, the writer and cartographer whose meticulous surveys of the Aran Islands in 1980 documented many such structures before they deteriorated further.