A clochán is a dry-stone beehive hut, built without mortar using a corbelling technique in which each successive course of stone projects slightly inward until the courses meet at the top, forming a self-supporting dome or vault. They are closely associated with early Christian monastic settlement in the west of Ireland, though some examples predate that period entirely.

The grouping of seven is what gives this site its particular interest. Single clocháns survive in reasonable numbers across the Corca Dhuibhne landscape, but a cluster of this size points toward organised habitation, possibly a monastic community working and sheltering together rather than a solitary hermit's cell. The site appears in the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage and published in 1986, which remains one of the more thorough regional inventories of the Dingle Peninsula's prehistoric and early medieval remains. The first edition Ordnance Survey maps, produced in Ireland during the 1830s, are themselves a valuable historical document; the surveyors recorded field monuments with a care that later land clearance and development have made all the more significant, and the presence of these clocháns on that early map confirms they were still a recognisable feature of the landscape at that time.