These are clochans, a word sometimes anglicised as "beehive huts", the characteristic drystone structures of early Irish monastic and rural life, built without mortar using a corbelling technique in which each course of stone projects slightly inward until the walls meet overhead. At least four survive here in some form, three of them apparently joined to one another, their interiors small and deliberate: one measures roughly three metres by two and a half internally, its walls preserving three small recessed cupboards, the kind of detail that suggests sustained, purposeful habitation rather than temporary shelter.

The site carries the name Fohernamanagh, from the Irish Fothair na Manach, meaning something like "the wooded hollow of the monks", and tradition connects it firmly to St. Brendan, the sixth-century navigator whose legendary Atlantic voyage became one of the most celebrated tales of medieval Irish Christianity. According to local tradition recorded by O'Donoghue in 1895, Brendan founded a monastery here; a separate account, cited by An Seabhac in 1939, holds that he stayed in the valley for a time before setting out on that famous journey. Neither claim can be verified archaeologically, and the sheer difficulty of reaching the place, combined with the ambiguity of the remains, makes it hard to separate early monastic origins from later use. Power, writing in 1923, noted that the valley was still home to three or four families at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which complicates any straightforward reading of the structures as purely early medieval in character.

The approach to the site is genuinely demanding, consistent with its reputation as the least accessible settlement on the mainland of the Dingle Peninsula. The clochans themselves sit on a relatively level terrace to the north-east of a larger enclosure, partially buried under a mound of their own collapse. What remains visible rewards close attention: the corbelled walling, the conjoined arrangement of the huts, and those small interior cupboards that hint at lives once organised within walls not much taller than a person.