The walls are well-preserved, stone-built, and still trace the outline of a structure with a clear entrance on the north side. What makes it quietly unusual is not just its age or ambiguity, but what lies beneath it: a souterrain, which is an underground passage or chamber of the kind often used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, built directly into the fabric of the house itself.

Ushnagh Hill carries considerable weight in Irish tradition, long regarded as the symbolic centre of the island, and the ringfort that contains this house site sits on a terrace with open views to the west, north, and east. The house was excavated between 1929 and 1930 by R. A. S. Macalister and R. Lloyd Praeger, two figures well known in Irish archaeology and natural history respectively, whose published account appeared across the years 1929 to 1931. Despite that investigation, the date of the structure remains unresolved, which is itself telling. The combination of a souterrain integrated within a house inside a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common from the early medieval period, suggests a layered use of the site over time, though the specifics remain elusive.