The houses sat on a gentle east-facing slope, aligned parallel to a much older ecclesiastical enclosure, with a metalled path running past the north-eastern edges of both. The northern house measured roughly 11 metres by 6.5 metres; the southern was slightly larger, at about 13 metres by 6.5 metres. Neither survived in anything approaching its original form, but a hearth endured in the northern building, and the contents of associated pits confirmed that people had actually lived there rather than simply worked nearby.

The broader picture that emerged from the excavation was striking. The two houses lay within the orbit of the early monastery of St. Máedóg, a figure associated with the founding of Ferns, and the enclosure ditch of that monastery was clearly identifiable in the ground. Attached to the ecclesiastical enclosure on its inside was a rectangular enclosure containing pits, post-holes, and a hearth, though no pottery or artefacts were recovered from it. Beyond its south-eastern edge, a zone roughly 40 metres by 8 metres yielded dense evidence of metalworking: hearths, furnace bases, waste slag, and a metalled surface with signs of smithing both above and below it. A series of large, straight-sided pits, possibly once timber-lined, had been cut through the outer edge of the monastery ditch itself, suggesting sustained industrial activity that paid little respect to the boundary of the original sacred precinct. The two houses sat just south-east of these pits, close enough to the enclosure that archaeologists suggested an inner bank may once have stood between them and it. The testing was carried out under licence 18E0526, with the findings subsequently published by McLoughlin in 2020.