A three-chambered clochan once stood at Gleann Fán, a type of dry-stone beehive building associated with early Christian and medieval life in the west of Ireland, where monks and farmers alike constructed them without mortar, relying entirely on the careful corbelling of flat stones. By the time the archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister documented it in 1899, it was already a ruin of note; today, very little remains visible at all.