Its name, clochan, refers to a type of early stone building, typically a dry-stone beehive hut, constructed without mortar using a corbelling technique in which each successive ring of stones is laid slightly inward until the courses meet at the top. What survives here is harder to read than a standing structure, but the clues are still present for anyone who looks.

The mound itself is pear-shaped in plan, roughly fourteen metres along its north-south axis and ten metres at its widest, rising to about one and a half metres. A slight hollow at the summit hints at a collapsed interior, and along the northern side, a curving line of what may be corbel-stones emerges at intervals from the earth and vegetation. This is, in essence, the skeleton of a corbelled structure that has gradually subsided into the ground, its profile softened by centuries of growth. Tim Robinson, who surveyed and mapped the Aran Islands with extraordinary care, noted the site in 1980, and it was subsequently included in the published archaeological inventory of West Galway.

The island is small enough that the townland of Ceathrú Droim Arlamáin is not difficult to reach on foot, and the mound lies towards the interior rather than along the coast. The vegetation that covers it is part of what makes it visually ambiguous, so the corbel-stones along the northern edge are the most reliable indicator of what the structure once was. It rewards patient looking rather than a quick glance.