A clochan, in its complete form, is a dry-stone corbelled hut, built without mortar, the kind of beehive structure associated with early Christian monks and scattered across the western seaboards of Ireland. What survives at Fán is fragmentary enough that even specialists have declined to classify it with any confidence.

A researcher named Curran recorded the presence of an ancient clochan at this location, though by the time the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey was compiled by J. Cuppage in 1986, the remains had deteriorated, or perhaps had always been ambiguous, to the point where a formal classification could not be made. That uncertainty is itself a kind of record. It places Fán in a category of sites that matter not for what they definitively are, but for what they hint at: a structure once coherent enough to be noted, now reduced to scattered stones that gesture at an older arrangement.