A clochan is a drystone beehive hut, built without mortar using corbelled stone courses that lean progressively inward until they meet at a central point, a technique with deep roots in early medieval Irish monastic and pastoral life. What makes the structure at Fán stand out is its scale: rather than a single cell, it comprises at least five interconnected chambers, making it a multiple clochan of a kind rarely documented on even this monument-dense peninsula.

The site was noted by R. A. S. Macalister in 1899, who recorded the complex along with what he described as an inaccessible souterrain. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically stone-lined, associated with early medieval settlements and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. The fact that the souterrain was already inaccessible at the time of Macalister's visit, well over a century ago, suggests the structure had already suffered considerable deterioration or collapse by the late Victorian period. The site later appeared in the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula published in 1986, which catalogued the extraordinary concentration of prehistoric and early medieval remains across this part of Kerry.