The logic is not as strange as it sounds, but the result is an archaeological palimpsest, one occupation layered quietly on top of another, with no certain date attached to either the building or the decision to put it there.

The house site sits in the south-western corner of a cashel, a type of circular or oval stone enclosure, typically of early medieval origin, built as a defended farmstead or settlement. The house itself measures twelve metres east to west and only 2.4 metres north to south, a notably narrow footprint divided into two rooms by a north-south wall roughly two metres thick. The larger room occupies the western six metres; the smaller, four metres to the east. A separate stone structure, with internal dimensions of around 1.8 by 1.6 metres, sits to the east of the house and leans against the inner face of the cashel wall, suggesting it may have served some ancillary function connected to the same household. Both the house and this smaller structure are considered probably later in date than the cashel enclosure itself, meaning whoever built them was already working within a pre-existing, and by then possibly ruinous, stone boundary rather than constructing one of their own. The date of the house remains indeterminate, which is its own kind of historical fact: the site has not yet yielded enough to say whether its occupants were early medieval, medieval, or considerably more recent.