At Baile Ristín on the Dingle Peninsula, four clochans, the dry-stone beehive huts associated with early medieval monastic and agricultural life in the west of Ireland, were recorded in the area as recently as 1964. By the time archaeologists looked more closely, no definite trace of them survived.

F. H. A. Aalen noted the four clochans in 1964, but when the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey was carried out and published by J. Cuppage in 1986, the picture had changed considerably. What surveyors did find were four sheep-pens or shelters, and it seems likely that at least three of these were built on top of, and partly from the stones of, the earlier hut remains. This is a pattern familiar elsewhere on the peninsula, where later agricultural use cannibalised older structures so thoroughly that the original form is effectively erased. The circular or oval dry-stone walling of a clochan would have offered ready-cut building material and a convenient footprint for a livestock enclosure, making the swap a practical one even if the archaeology suffers for it.