A clochán is a dry-stone beehive hut, built without mortar using corbelling techniques, and they are closely associated with early Christian monastic settlement in the west of Ireland. The irony at this particular site is quietly striking: the same agricultural impulse that shaped these landscapes for centuries, the clearing of stones to make ground workable, has ended up burying the very structures that earlier generations built from those same stones.

The foundations here were noted by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1899, and the site was later recorded by Curran and subsequently incorporated into J. Cuppage's comprehensive archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, published in 1986. By the time that survey was compiled, the cairn had already obscured whatever remained of the original structures at ground level. Whether the clocháns were part of a small hermitage or a more isolated anchoritic enclosure, the evidence no longer exists in visible form. What survives is the record of their foundations and the knowledge that something older lies underneath the accumulated debris of later farming.