A clochan is a small dry-stone beehive hut, a building technique associated with early Christian monastic and farming communities along the Atlantic seaboard, while a cashel is a roughly circular stone enclosure, the rural equivalent of a fortified homestead. Together they suggest that this strip of level ground, marginal by modern standards, was once considered worth settling and defending.

The structures were recorded by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986. The site sits towards the southern end of the cultivated strip, where the usable land begins to give way to bogland. Perhaps the most intriguing detail is a circular depression measuring 5.5 metres in diameter, noted in the north-western sector of the site, which may mark the position of a hut-site, the sunken ghost of a dwelling long since collapsed or robbed for building material elsewhere. The qualifications in the original description, "possible cashel", "may indicate", are worth taking seriously; this is archaeology working at the edge of legibility, reading the land rather than standing structures.