The structure measures roughly five by six metres across, modest even by the standards of its time, and what makes it quietly remarkable is not the building itself but the layered story underneath it: this was at least a third iteration on the same patch of hillside, part of a sequence of no fewer than six successive phases of construction identified in the immediate area.

Excavations carried out in 1999 revealed the house's footprint through a slot trench, a narrow channel cut into the ground to receive the base of a wall, running along the north-eastern arc, with fainter traces of a similar trench to the west. The southern half of the structure had been largely destroyed by later cultivation, but enough survived to sketch the essentials of early medieval domestic life. A stone-lintelled drain projected outward from the eastern arc, which led the excavator to suggest the doorway was positioned along that side of the wall. Inside, the floor was a layer of redeposited subsoil, and over it lay thick deposits of charcoal and ash; in places, the burnt material appeared to consist of straw or reeds, possibly the remnants of a thatched roof that had come down in fire. Two hearths, each roughly a metre in diameter, were found at the north-eastern and south-eastern parts of the interior, and two post-holes near the north-east arc may have supported the roof structure. The house itself replaced an earlier building immediately to the east and was constructed after an enclosure, a defined boundary feature, that predated both dwellings.