But beneath the turf at Carns lies the outline of a two-roomed house, roughly fourteen metres long, whose walls were built not from stone but from earth packed around a framework of wooden posts, a technique that leaves almost no trace above ground until someone starts to dig.

Excavation of the site revealed the remains of two hearths, one in each room, and a small collection of objects that quietly fix the moment when the house was given up. A fragment of a chamber pot, a clay pipe-stem, and a bead from a glass necklace all point to abandonment sometime in the eighteenth century. Taken together, they suggest a household that departed in ordinary circumstances rather than catastrophe, leaving behind the kinds of everyday things that accumulate in corners and are not worth carrying. The south-eastern room, the larger of the two at roughly four and a half metres by nearly three, had its entrances set into the long walls, which is a detail that says something about how the interior was arranged and used, though exactly what the building's original purpose was remains uncertain. The house sits within a wider settlement cluster, and an adjacent field bank, originally built in drystone, survives nearby. A pit close to the house has not been dated, though prehistoric stone tools were recovered in the vicinity, suggesting the landscape around Carns was in use long before any of these structures were built.