The house site survives only as a faint rectangular outline pressed into the pasture, its walls reduced to a low bank of earth a little under a third of a metre high. What makes the arrangement quietly arresting is its location: not beside the ringfort, not near it, but actually inside it, tucked into its north-western quadrant as though the later occupant found the old enclosure a convenient ready-made boundary, or perhaps a place that still carried some sense of shelter or significance.

A ringfort, to use the common shorthand, is a circular or roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, most commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though they were sometimes reused in later centuries. The house site at Killynan sits within one such enclosure and measures roughly 8.8 metres from north-east to south-west and 5 metres across, a modest oblong space enclosed by an earthen bank about 3.2 metres wide at its base. A gap of around 0.8 metres midway along the south-eastern side marks where the entrance once was. The date of the house is unknown, which is itself a small puzzle; the structure could belong to the early medieval period, or it could be considerably later, a farmstead or dwelling reusing an ancient enclosure at some point during the medieval or post-medieval centuries. The rise on which it sits looks out in all directions over gently rolling pasture, the kind of position that would have made practical sense to a farmer keeping an eye on livestock as much as to anyone with an older reason for watching the horizon.