That alone makes it worth noting. The structure is a clochan, a type of dry-stone beehive hut built using the corbelling technique, in which each course of stones is laid slightly inward of the one below until the courses finally meet at the top, producing a self-supporting dome without mortar or timber. Clochans are strongly associated with early medieval monastic life in Ireland, and the Dingle Peninsula has some of the finest surviving examples anywhere in the country. This one, however, is almost certainly not ancient. Surveyors assessing it judged it to be probably fairly modern in date, meaning it belongs to a more recent tradition of building in a very old style, whether for agricultural use, storage, or simple shelter.

The clochan sits adjacent to the derelict village of Glanfahan, which occupies the valley known in Irish as Gleann Fán. The building measures 3.2 metres in diameter and stands 3.1 metres high, modest dimensions that nonetheless allowed for a fully enclosed, weatherproof interior. It does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps, which is perhaps why it has attracted little attention beyond the 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region compiled by J. Cuppage. That survey covered the broader Dingle Peninsula and brought together documentation of a landscape dense with prehistoric and early Christian remains. The abandoned settlement beside which this clochan stands is itself a reminder of more recent upheaval, the kind of rural desertion that emptied many western townlands over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The combination of a post-medieval hut built in a prehistoric idiom, standing next to a village that no longer has any inhabitants, gives the site a layered and slightly melancholy character that maps consistently fail to capture.