A clochan is a dry-stone beehive hut, a building technique associated with early medieval Ireland and particularly dense along this stretch of the Kerry coast, where dozens of such structures survive in varying states of preservation. This one, however, barely survives at all.

When the archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister visited in 1899, he described a multiple clochan with four or five chambers arranged in a north-south line, a relatively unusual configuration that would have made it a site of some interest. By the time a more systematic survey of the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula was carried out and published by J. Cuppage in 1986, the complex had been reduced to a cairn of loose stones. Within the southern end of that cairn, the foundation of a single circular structure can still be traced, roughly four metres in diameter, with an entrance on the east side and a second entrance to the north. That northern entrance connects into a sub-rectangular enclosure measuring five by three and a half metres, its outline preserved as a low grass-grown bank or wall. About two metres further north again, an arc of bank hints at the former position of a third structure, though little more than the curve remains. What Macalister recorded as a coherent multi-roomed building has, within less than a century, become a puzzle of fragmentary outlines requiring some patience to read in the ground.