A clochan is a dry-stone beehive hut, the kind built without mortar, corbelled inward course by course until the walls meet overhead, a technique associated with early medieval monastic life along Ireland's Atlantic fringe. What survives at this particular site is something less than a ruin and rather more than nothing: two nineteenth-century observers noted what they described as vague traces, which is about as qualified an archaeological sighting as the record allows.

Those observers were Curran, cataloguing local antiquities, and R.A.S. Macalister, who mentioned the site in 1899. That Macalister was already hedging his language at that point suggests the structure had been eroding from memory as much as from stone for some time. The Dingle Peninsula, known in Irish as Corca Dhuibhne, contains one of the densest concentrations of early Christian and prehistoric monuments in Ireland, and clochans of varying states of preservation are scattered across it. That density makes the near-absence at Gleann Fán quietly interesting: something was here, recognised by people who knew what to look for, but it left only the faintest impression.