Clocháns, the Irish word for these dry-stone huts, are associated across the west of Ireland with early Christian monastic life, and the beehive variety, where corbelled walls curve inward to a self-supporting dome, are particularly common on the Dingle Peninsula. But the pair at An Riasc turned out to contain something rather less devotional than prayer.

Excavation of the interior of the structure designated Clochan D revealed that its hard floor surface had survived largely intact, and cut through that floor were the remains of at least three iron-smelting furnaces. Further evidence of metalworking, including a spread of peat charcoal and iron slag, was found in the collapsed material to the east of the building. Recovered from the same level were a spindle whorl and a sherd of E ware, a type of imported pottery from western Gaul that reached Ireland between roughly the fifth and seventh centuries, and which archaeologists often treat as a marker of early medieval contact with Continental Europe. The structure itself is 4.5 metres in diameter internally, with walls 1.1 metres thick, built of large upright slabs on the inside with dry-stone walling raised above them to a surviving height of 0.8 metres. Neither Clochan C nor D shows the inward lean typical of true corbelling, but the small diameter and the size of the stones found in the collapse both point to a beehive roof. The two are joined by an internal doorway just one metre wide, with a single jambstone surviving on one side. The site sits about 1.25 kilometres east of Ballyferriter, near the highest point of the townland, with open views north across Smerwick Harbour. What had looked, architecturally, like a modest monastic outbuilding turned out to have been a workshop, one producing iron and perhaps also textile goods, at a site already connected by its pottery to trade routes running across the early medieval Atlantic world.