The house itself is modest even by the standards of rural vernacular architecture: a rectangular footprint, roughly ten metres north to south and four metres east to west, its stone foundations now softened under a covering of sod. What gives it a particular quiet strangeness is its relationship to the feature beside it. The building abuts the north-eastern side of a rath, a type of circular or oval earthen enclosure built during the early medieval period, typically as a farmstead or enclosed settlement. That ancient bank has since been absorbed into the geometry of a square field, its curved line still legible but folded into the landscape.

The interior of the house appears to have been divided into three rooms, a layout familiar from the single-storey rural dwellings common across the west of Ireland before and during the nineteenth century, when households often kept animals at one end and living quarters at the other. A grass-covered trackway, slightly sunken from long use, extends from the building downslope to the east-north-east, suggesting a routinely travelled path to fields or water below. The decision to build so close to the rath may have been entirely practical, using its bank as a windbreak or boundary, though it means two very different periods of habitation now share the same small corner of ground.