The structure at Fanygalvan was recorded in official surveys during the 1990s under the category of clochan, a term for the dry-stone beehive huts associated with early Christian monks and hermits, some of which survive in remarkable condition elsewhere in Clare and on the western seaboard. When an inspection was carried out in 1998, however, the building turned out to be of modern construction, a detail that quietly complicates its story without diminishing it.

The hut sits within a broader field system on open karst, the bare fractured limestone landscape characteristic of the Burren, where thin grass cover grows in the grikes between the pavements and the ground offers little shelter. The structure itself is rectangular in plan, roughly four metres north to south and three and a half metres east to west, with an entrance at the south end of the east wall just under a metre wide and less than a metre high. Inside, the space becomes D-shaped, the straight side walls gradually corbelling inward, meaning each course of stone projects slightly beyond the one below, until they close to form a roof. That roof had partially collapsed by the time the 1998 inspection was made. The site had been noted earlier on a first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map annotated by Thomas Johnson Westropp, the Clare antiquarian and prolific recorder of monuments active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A booley hut of this kind would have served as seasonal shelter during the old practice of booleying, the summer movement of cattle and their herders to upland or rough grazing, a tradition once widespread across Ireland. Whether this particular example was built to serve that purpose or as a later imitation of an older form, the careful corbelled technique speaks to a working knowledge of how such structures were raised without mortar.