A clochaun is a dry-stone beehive hut, built without mortar, with corbelled walls that curve inward and meet at the top to form a self-supporting dome. They are associated with early Christian monasticism in the west of Ireland, though some examples are far older, and the Dingle Peninsula has a remarkable concentration of them. The one recorded at Gleann Fán arrived in the historical record already broken.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister noted a damaged example here in 1899, a single line in a wider survey of the area. That brief mention is almost all that survives in the way of documentation. The structure was already in poor condition when he found it, which means its decline stretches back well before the end of the nineteenth century. Whether it was ever part of a larger monastic settlement, a solitary hermit's cell, or a later field shelter repurposing an older form of construction, the record does not say.