At Baile Ristín on the Dingle Peninsula, a cluster of clochans, the dry-stone beehive huts associated with early medieval monastic and farming life in the west of Ireland, was recorded in the mid-twentieth century, yet by the time systematic survey work was undertaken, no definite trace of them could be confirmed on the ground.

The researcher Aalen, writing in 1964, noted four clochans in this area. What surveyors found instead were four sheep-pens or shelters, and the suspicion arose that at least three of these later enclosures had been built on top of, and largely from the stone of, the earlier huts. It is a pattern familiar across the Dingle Peninsula, where centuries of practical farming have quietly dismantled one type of structure to raise another. The reuse of cut or dressed stone for animal shelters is one of the more common ways in which early remains disappear without entirely vanishing; the material survives, but its original form and purpose are lost. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of Corca Dhuibhne, which covers this stretch of the peninsula, recorded the site among the many hundreds of features catalogued across the area, noting the possibility of that continuity between the ancient huts and the later pens.