These are clochans, or clochauns, the corbelled circular stone cells that early Irish monks built without mortar, layering flat stones inward and upward until the courses met overhead in a self-supporting dome. The ones on Illauntannig no longer have their roofs intact, but the walls of at least one still stand to two metres, and the entrance passage, a little over a metre high and barely wide enough for a person to pass through sideways, retains its original lintelled frame with jambs that lean slightly inward as they rise.

The settlement these huts belonged to is remarkably complete for a site of its age. Enclosed within a cashel, a defensive stone enclosure characteristic of early Irish monastic foundations, it contains two small oratories, a souterrain (an underground passage or chamber, probably used for storage or shelter), three leachts, which are low rectangular stone monuments associated with prayer or commemoration, a burial ground, and a stone cross. Objects recovered within the enclosure include three cross-slabs, a hand-bell, a bullaun stone, the large hollowed boulder used for grinding or ritual purposes in early Christian contexts, and fragments of five quern-stones. A second bullaun stone sits roughly a hundred metres to the south, close to the waterline. Traces of a hut-site and old field walls on the nearby promontory of Reennafardarrig may represent a further outlier of the same monastic community, and a boulder there is reputed to bear a cross inscription. The site was surveyed as part of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986.