It measures about eight metres long and just over six metres wide, and a slight hollow at its centre hints at something that was once enclosed. This is all that survives of a clochan, a type of dry-stone beehive hut built without mortar, whose corbelled walls were once a familiar feature of early Christian and early medieval Ireland. The structure was substantial enough to be recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as a rectangular building on the eastern side of a field boundary, though the ground now shows only a subcircular collapse.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted two clochans standing approximately one mile to the south-west of Cill Rónáin in 1895, and this site is likely one of them. Westropp was a prolific recorder of Irish field monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his observations on the Aran Islands form part of a wider effort to document structures that were already, even then, in varying states of decay. The fact that the OS maps show a rectangular outline where the ground now presents a rounded heap suggests the walls had already begun to slump by the time systematic surveying took place. The slight central depression is read as the probable position of a collapsed internal chamber, which would have been the sheltered interior of the hut.