A clochan is a dry-stone corbelled structure, built without mortar, in which each course of stones projects slightly inward over the one below until the walls meet at a single point or a narrow cap. The technique is ancient and, where it has survived, it tends to do so because the building was left alone rather than robbed for field walls or road material.

The Kerry landscape holds a remarkable concentration of these structures, many associated with early Christian monastic life, though others are more difficult to date with precision and may have served secular or agricultural purposes across a long span of centuries. The example at Coomlumminy is recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Kerry, compiled by Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan and published in 1996, which catalogued the prehistoric and early medieval remains of the south-west of the county in systematic detail. That survey identified this particular clochan as intact, a distinction worth pausing on, since completeness is genuinely uncommon among vernacular dry-stone buildings of this age.