What makes it quietly arresting is not its condition but its name: Clochán na Marbh, which translates roughly as the Hut of the Dead. A clochán is a dry-stone beehive hut, a corbelled structure built without mortar, of a type associated with early Christian monks and hermits who sought out exposed, inhospitable ground precisely because it was inhospitable. That this one carries such a name, and occupies ground so close to a mountain summit, gives it a quality that goes beyond the merely archaeological.

The structure measures approximately 2.75 metres in diameter, with surviving walls reaching only about 0.8 metres in height. Those dimensions speak to something that was never large, a single-person shelter at most, now reduced further by the weather and centuries of neglect. The name Clochán na Marbh is not explained by the available record, and that silence is part of what makes the site compelling. It may refer to exposure and the danger of the mountain, or to some older local memory that has not been written down. The site sits within the Corca Dhuibhne landscape, the westernmost reaches of the Dingle Peninsula, a place with an unusually dense concentration of early medieval and prehistoric remains.