These are clochans, the beehive-shaped dry-stone structures associated with early Irish monasticism, built without mortar using a corbelling technique in which each course of stone projects slightly inward until the walls meet at a point or dome overhead. At least four survive here in ruined form, three of them apparently once joined together, their outlines still legible beneath the debris.

The place is known in Irish as Fothair na Manach, meaning something like the terrace or slope of the monks, and the name alone hints at what may once have stood here. Tradition links the site to St. Brendan, the sixth-century navigator-saint of Kerry, who is said to have founded a monastery at this location and to have paused here before setting out on the legendary sea voyage that, in medieval imagination at least, took him as far as North America. The sheer difficulty of reaching the valley supports the idea of a monastic foundation; early Irish monks often sought out precisely this kind of deliberate remoteness. Yet the picture is complicated by more recent history. Despite its isolation, the valley is said to have been home to three or four families at the start of the nineteenth century, and it is not certain how much of what survives today reflects that later occupation rather than any earlier, ecclesiastical one. One of the huts bears a particularly clear sign of reuse: what was probably originally a circular clochan had a straight wall added across its southern side, converting it into a functional sheep shelter. The corbelled wall reaches just over a metre in height at its tallest point, and a recess in the north-east section of the wall is still visible. A single surviving course of stone from a rectangular structure peeks above the general collapse nearby, suggesting the site accumulated layers of use across very different periods.