It began its life as a clochan, the Irish term for a dry-stone beehive hut built using the corbelling technique, where stones are layered inward in progressively tighter rings until they meet at the top without any mortar to hold them. At some point, whoever was using the land found a more immediate purpose for it and converted the building into a turf store or sheep-shelter. That shift from early ecclesiastical or domestic architecture to agricultural utility is not unusual in this part of Kerry, but it is a good reminder that ancient structures rarely sit undisturbed; they get repurposed, patched, and quietly absorbed into whatever life needs them for.

The clochan measures 3.5 metres in diameter, 1.5 metres in height, and has walls roughly 1.2 metres thick, proportions that speak to the considerable labour of its original construction. Abutting the northern side is a rock shelter that the archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1899, interpreted as a souterrain, an underground or semi-underground passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or concealment. Whether Macalister's reading of the rock shelter is correct remains a matter of interpretation, but the pairing of a corbelled clochan with a possible souterrain is the kind of detail that suggests this small corner of Gleann Fán was once more than a passing convenience in the landscape.