The structures are clochans, the dry-stone beehive-shaped cells associated with early Christian monastic life in Ireland, though the first of the two here turns out to be not entirely beehive-shaped at all.

When a Kilbride investigated the site in 1867 and published his findings the following year, the first clochan was found to be quadrangular on the inside, measuring roughly 2.5 metres by 2.65 metres, with a height of around 2.45 metres. Its corbelled roof, a technique in which stone layers are progressively cantilevered inward until they meet at the top without the use of mortar, was then still intact. An entrance faced east, with a stone-walled passage leading away from it. A second clochan stood about five metres to the west-northwest, a considerably larger mound of limestone running roughly 12 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south, and just over a metre and a half high, its upper surface marked by a flat rectangular slab. By the time Kilbride was writing, this second structure was already in ruins. The cause, apparently, was not neglect or weather but the insertion of burials into the fabric of the mound itself, the stone gradually displaced to accommodate the dead. T. J. Westropp noted the site in 1895, and Tim Robinson, whose meticulous mappings of the Aran Islands brought many such features to wider attention, recorded it in 1980.