A clochan, sometimes spelled clochán, is a dry-stone beehive hut, built without mortar, its corbelled walls leaning inward until they meet in a rough dome. They are associated with early Christian monasticism in Ireland, particularly along the western seaboard, where monks sought isolated, wind-scoured places to pray and work. The one at Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh was already a ruin when it was first formally noted.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister recorded its existence in 1899, describing it simply as a ruined clochán. That single line is very nearly all that survives in the documentary record. Macalister was working at a time when antiquarian fieldwork on the Dingle Peninsula was beginning to systematise what local people had known for generations, and his notation, however brief, is enough to anchor the structure in a recognisable tradition of early medieval habitation along this stretch of the Kerry coast. Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh itself, as a place name, suggests an early ecclesiastical connection, the element cill referring to a small church or monastic cell, which sits neatly alongside the presence of a beehive hut in the vicinity.