A. S. Macalister when he recorded the site in 1899. A clochan is a dry-stone corbelled hut, built without mortar by carefully overlapping flat stones until they form a self-supporting beehive dome. Single examples survive in reasonable condition across the western seaboard, most famously on Skellig Michael, but a triple grouping suggests something more deliberate, perhaps a small monastic cluster or a farmstead of early medieval origin, though the evidence here is too fragmentary to say with confidence.

By the time Macalister noted the site, it was already described as much-ruined, meaning that even in the late nineteenth century the structure had deteriorated well beyond the point of easy interpretation. The record places it within the broader archaeological landscape of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the westernmost parishes of Kerry where early Christian and prehistoric remains are exceptionally dense. That density is partly a consequence of geography: the peninsula's relative isolation preserved features that elsewhere were cleared, built over, or simply forgotten. The triple arrangement at Gleann Fán was significant enough to make it into Macalister's survey of the area, but no detailed excavation or restoration appears to have followed.