What began as a circular drystone hut, built by hand without mortar, was at some point quietly pressed into service as a sheep shelter or fold. The original structure survives only partially: of the wall's current height of around 1.25 metres, just half a metre or so is genuinely ancient. The rest is the accumulated patching and raising of later hands, practical and indifferent to archaeology.

Drystone huts of this kind are scattered across the uplands of the Dingle Peninsula, relics of early settlement and seasonal occupation in terrain that now feels remote but was once worked with some regularity. The structure at An Chlais measures roughly 4.1 metres across internally, a modest but functional diameter for a single-roomed shelter. It sits in open mountain terrain, exposed and unhedged, which gives some sense of how people lived and worked in this landscape before any permanent infrastructure softened it. The site was recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986 by J. Cuppage, a survey that systematically documented the Dingle Peninsula's extraordinary concentration of early remains.