The uncertainty in that count is itself telling. A clochán is a dry-stone beehive hut, built without mortar, corbelled inward course by course until the walls meet at the top, a technique used in early medieval Ireland that requires no roof timber and can last, in the right conditions, for centuries. That the number here remains unsettled, recorded as two or possibly three, suggests structures that have worn back into the landscape, their walls perhaps reduced to low stony humps that only reveal themselves at certain angles of light or under the right seasonal growth.

The record of these structures draws on Judith Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a landmark study of the Dingle Peninsula that catalogued an extraordinary density of monuments left by early Christian communities and their predecessors. The peninsula was a significant zone of monastic activity, and clocháns elsewhere on Dingle, most famously on the Skellig rocks and at sites around Fahan, are associated with solitary or communal religious life. Whether these particular examples at Na Gleannta Thuaidh carried any such function is not recorded, but the landscape context is consistent with it.