The walls stand only about forty centimetres above ground, and the footprint they trace is modest, roughly fifteen metres long and just under seven metres wide. What makes the remains slightly unusual is the presence of a cross-wall towards the southern end of the structure, partitioning off a distinct internal space around five and a half metres deep. Whether this was a separate room, a storage area, or a byre for animals is not recorded, but the division suggests a household organised with some deliberateness, not merely four walls and a roof.

The house sits within an earthen bawn, a term for a defensive enclosure, typically of earth or stone, used to protect a dwelling and its outbuildings or livestock. Bawns of this kind are strongly associated with the plantation period in Ireland, when settlers and established landowners alike fortified their domestic arrangements against the uncertainties of the seventeenth century. The combination of a bawn and a rectangular house of these proportions, set on the sheltered southern face of Slievenamon, points to a settlement of some substance, even if little of it now stands above ankle height. Kilcash itself carries considerable historical weight in the area; the nearby castle was associated with the Butler family, and the locality was later memorialised in the well-known Irish-language lament "Caoine Cill Chais", which mourned the decline of the old Gaelic and Catholic order in the eighteenth century. The house in the wood predates that lament, but it belongs to the same landscape of change and displacement.