Where two or three clochans once stood, there is now only a large field clearance cairn, the kind of mound that generations of farmers built by dragging loose stones off workable land and heaping them to one side. The original buildings lie beneath or within that accumulation, their outlines lost to agricultural tidying rather than to any dramatic event.

Clochans are dry-stone beehive huts, corbelled into a dome without mortar, and they are characteristic of early Christian monastic and hermetic life along this stretch of the Kerry coast. The foundations at Fán were noted by the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister in 1899, who recorded the remains of two or three such structures at the site. By the time later researchers returned, the field clearance cairn had come to dominate, a reminder of how thoroughly the needs of everyday land use can obscure what lies beneath. The Dingle Peninsula holds an unusually dense concentration of these corbelled huts, and Fán represents the kind of marginal survival that gives a fuller picture of how widely they were once distributed across the landscape, beyond the more celebrated groupings that have survived intact elsewhere.