Two have collapsed entirely, their outlines now only suggested by low, grass-covered swellings in the earth. The third still stands, partially at least, its ancient walls curving inward in a way that hints at what the whole arrangement once looked like.

Clochans, sometimes called beehive huts, are a distinctive form of early Irish dry-stone architecture in which walls are built using a corbelling technique: each course of stone projects slightly further inward than the one below it, until the structure closes into a domed or pointed roof without the need for any mortar. The three huts on Inis Gluaire were individually named on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1838 and 1921 as Torthigh beg, Torthigh more, and Torthigh East. A detailed account from the 1838 OS Letters describes the largest of them, Torthigh more, as broadly oval in plan with an internal diameter of roughly 4.5 to 5 metres. It had two exterior doorways, one to the north and one to the east, though by 1838 the eastern doorway was already blocked. The northern entrance narrowed from 1.2 metres wide on the outside to 0.9 metres on the inside, roofed over with three large stone flags, and the original stone steps leading down into the interior were by then buried under sand. From inside Torthigh more, a second internal doorway connected directly to the smallest of the three, Torthigh beg, which had a diameter of around 3 metres. By the time the scholar Françoise Henri visited in the early 1940s, the north-western clochan was already nearly completely ruined.

What survives today is most likely Torthigh East, the north-eastern clochan, now a National Monument in state ownership. The interior is sunken relative to the surrounding ground, and while the western half of the wall still stands to a height of around 1.6 metres, its external face is hidden beneath a sloping grass-covered bank. Near the northern arc, the inward curve of the corbelling remains clearly visible in the stonework, a rare and legible trace of the building logic that once held the whole roof together.