The structure is modest by any measure: rectangular, roughly seven metres east to west and just over four metres north to south, with walls reduced now to a bank no more than forty centimetres high on its outer face. A gap in the southern side may mark where a doorway once stood. A hawthorn tree has taken hold along the northern wall, as hawthorns tend to do on old earthworks, their roots working quietly through whatever remains.

What makes this particular scrap of archaeology worth pausing over is less the structure itself than its situation among other, older things. About seventy-five metres to the south-southwest lies a megalithic tomb, the kind of monument built in the Neolithic period, typically between roughly 4000 and 2500 BC, as a communal burial place. Closer still, to the south-southeast, are a holy well and a graveyard, the well sitting about a hundred and twenty-seven metres away and the graveyard a little further beyond it. The house site has no confirmed date, which places it in an awkward category: too degraded or unexcavated to assign confidently to any period. It could be medieval, post-medieval, or something else entirely. It sits in rough grazing land overlooking the Kylemore lakes to the northeast, with rock outcrop breaking the surface nearby, and the whole landscape carries that layered quality common to the west of Ireland, where the Famine-era, the early modern, and the prehistoric all occupy the same few acres without much fuss.