Known correctly as Clochán Choillte Choinín, according to the placename scholar T. Robinson, it sits at the western edge of a shallow depression, roughly forty metres south-east of a nearby enclosure. A clochán is traditionally a dry-stone corbelled hut, the beehive-shaped shelters associated with early monastic and rural life in the west of Ireland, though this example departs from that form: it is rectangular rather than circular, measuring six metres long by four and a half metres wide, and whatever roof it once carried has long since gone.

By the time the antiquarian G.H. Kinahan recorded it in 1869, the structure was already a ruin. The southern wall had been completely destroyed, and the interior was filled with rubble. A lintelled ope, meaning a simple door or window opening spanned by a single horizontal stone rather than an arch, survives in the eastern wall, which gives some sense of the building's original character. The use of the word clochán in the place name may reflect either the building's actual construction tradition or simply the way local memory categorised any small stone structure of uncertain age. The distinction matters because the rectangular plan is unusual for the type, and suggests the building may belong to a later period, or to a different function, than the corbelled huts the term usually calls to mind.