The site at Cloghfune sits on stony, heather-covered ground with views down towards the Upper Lake, and at first glance the most prominent features look almost prehistoric. Scattered across the fields are large cairns of cleared stone, and from a distance they bear a striking resemblance to beehive huts, the corbelled dry-stone structures associated with early Christian monasticism in Kerry. Up close, though, they are something more prosaic and in their own way just as interesting: the accumulated labour of farmers clearing rocks from their land, piled up over years to make the ground workable.

What remains here dates to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a period when marginal upland ground across Ireland was being pressed into use, often by families with little choice but to farm difficult terrain. The house itself is largely collapsed and roofless, its interior measuring roughly five and a half metres by three metres, with walls of masonry and clay mortar still standing to between one and two metres in places. A doorway faces northwest, and part of the southeast gable survives more or less intact. An animal enclosure was built directly against the southeast corner of the house, a practical arrangement common to small farming settlements of the period. Around the house, the field walls that once divided this hillside into manageable plots are also collapsing back into the landscape, their rough construction a sign that whoever built them was working quickly and with whatever material lay immediately to hand. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in the nineteenth century, recorded both the house and the field system when at least some of this infrastructure was still legible on the ground.