It is one of three such buildings arranged around the church, to the north, southeast, and south, and their relationship to the oratory suggests a monastic enclosure of some kind, the kind of modest cluster of cells and ancillary structures that once housed small communities of monks on the western edge of Ireland.

Teampall Chiaráin, dedicated to Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, sits within the townland of Eochaill, and the buildings surrounding it were noted by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in 1895. Westropp was a prolific recorder of monuments across the west of Ireland, and his observations form part of a long tradition of documenting the dense concentration of early medieval remains on the Aran Islands. The three buildings he noted represent the kind of satellite structures commonly found around early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where the boundary between the sacred and the domestic was deliberately blurred, with monks living, working, and praying within a compact, organised space.