The walls, built without mortar in the long tradition of Aran stonework, survive to a height of only thirty centimetres, and the whole thing measures little more than eight metres in length by five and a half metres wide. Yet the proportions, the traces of an internal division, and a narrow entrance just forty centimetres across all point to something that was once, in some sense, a home.

The structure sits on its limestone shelf in the shadow of Dún Aonghasa, the great prehistoric stone fort that dominates the southwestern skyline above this part of the island, known in Irish as Dún Onaght in the immediate local placename. Drystone construction, in which stones are laid and fitted without any binding mortar, is the defining building technique of the Aran Islands, shaped by a landscape where limestone is the most abundant material available. The house's date remains indeterminate, which in itself says something: the form is ancient enough, and the survival too fragmentary, to place it with any confidence within a particular century or era. Timothy Robinson, whose survey work in 1980 first recorded the structure in detail, was working within a broader effort to document the archaeological fabric of these islands before it was further eroded by time and weather.

The entrance on the east-south-east side, narrow as a doorway in a field wall, faces away from the prevailing Atlantic wind. Inside, the ghost of an internal partition suggests at least two distinct spaces, perhaps separating human living quarters from animal shelter, an arrangement common in vernacular Atlantic Irish dwellings across many centuries. What the structure cannot tell us, and what the archaeology cannot recover, is the name of anyone who lived there, or when they left.