The site is known widely as Synge's Chair, after the playwright J. M. Synge, who visited the island repeatedly around the turn of the twentieth century and reportedly favoured this exposed vantage point. The association with Synge has given the place a literary reputation, but what actually survives on the ground is rather older and considerably more fragmentary: the remains of early medieval clochans, the dry-stone beehive huts built by monks and hermits across the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland, their corbelled roofs drawing each course of stone inward until the structure sealed itself at the top.

Two separate structures have been recorded here, both heavily ruined. The northernmost, designated (a), is largely a spread of collapsed rubble measuring roughly seven metres by three, with a circular chamber at its north end and a smaller rectangular chamber to the south. A wall face on the southern side suggests a third chamber once stood nearby, though nothing of it remains above ground. The second structure, (b), lies about twelve metres to the south-south-west and is in marginally better condition. It contains a circular chamber approximately 3.2 metres across on its east-west axis, and a subrectangular chamber to the south with unusually narrow walls, narrow enough that the archaeologist Tim Robinson, writing in 1980, suggested this southern section may never have been roofed at all. Whether that chamber was always open to the sky, or was simply a later and more roughly constructed addition, is not clear from what survives.

The site sits in the townland of Ceathrú an Teampaill, a name meaning roughly the quarter of the church, which hints at the density of early ecclesiastical activity on Inis Meáin. The clochans themselves are difficult to date with precision, but comparable structures across the Aran Islands and the wider west of Ireland are generally associated with early Christian monasticism. The literary afterlife of this particular site, pinned to a playwright's habit of sitting among old stones and watching the Atlantic, has perhaps overshadowed the archaeology that was already there.