But those modest foundations describe a structure that was once a complete domestic space, roughly twenty feet long internally and seventeen feet wide, with its long axis oriented west-northwest to east-southeast. Two opposing openings, one on each of the shorter walls, would have allowed passage in and out. The proportions are compact but not cramped, the kind of dwelling that would have sheltered a household and perhaps a few animals during the early medieval period in Ireland, a time roughly spanning the fifth to twelfth centuries, when small enclosed farmsteads of this type were scattered across the Irish countryside.

The house came to light during excavation of the enclosure in which it sits, a defined boundary of the sort commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. The archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, writing in 1951, recorded the structural details and assigned the site to the Early Christian period or later. Drystone construction, meaning walls built from uncut or roughly shaped stone without mortar, was a practical technique suited to the rocky landscapes of West Cork, and the survival of foundations to any height after more than a thousand years reflects both the solidity of the original build and the relative shelter of the enclosed setting. O'Kelly's careful measurements give the house an external footprint of twenty-eight feet by twenty-eight feet, making it almost square on the outside despite the slightly more rectangular interior dimensions.