What archaeologists found there was not a ruin in the usual sense but a ghost of a building, readable in post holes, scorched earth, and the quiet geometry of a life lived and lost.

Excavations carried out in 1996 and 1997 uncovered the footprint of a rectangular, post-built house, a type of construction in which upright timber posts formed the structural skeleton of the walls rather than mortared stone. The building measured at least 5.8 metres along its longer axis, which ran northwest to southeast, parallel to the street it faced onto. A paved central aisle ran from the doorway at the street front through the interior to the rear of the house, with the hearth positioned at the southeast end, set equidistant from the front and back walls. Post and stake holes between the aisle and the fireside suggest an internal partition of some kind divided that end of the building, perhaps separating a working or sleeping area from the main passage. Four substantial post holes along the central axis supported a ridge-pole roof, with additional supports set into the northeast and southwest walls. Medieval pottery came up alongside organic material including what may have been clay floors, all consistent with ordinary domestic use fronting onto what was then a busy urban street. Radiocarbon dating and the associated finds place the house broadly in the fourteenth century, and the evidence suggests it was not simply abandoned: it appears to have been destroyed by fire, ending its occupation abruptly.

Friar Street still runs through Cashel today, and the archaeological deposits recorded in the late 1990s were noted as surviving in situ, meaning the physical remains of this house remain beneath the street frontage, sealed underground, largely intact.