During a site assessment carried out directly west of Abbey Cottage, the north-west angle of an earlier stone structure came to light, consisting of two courses of quoin stones, the dressed corner blocks used to give a wall its squared edge and structural strength, sitting atop a cruder foundation layer. The dressing on the stone pointed to a 16th-century date, placing the structure in a period when Howth's ecclesiastical life was still very much active.

Abbey Cottage is the western portion of what was once the priests' house attached to St Mary's Abbey, Howth, a medieval collegiate church whose remains still stand on the peninsula. What the excavation suggested, as recorded by Meenan in 1995 and compiled by Geraldine Stout, is that the cottage was not always where it is now. The buried angle wall and the surviving gable of Abbey Cottage follow precisely the same alignment, which points to the buried remains being the original gable end of the building. At some point, most likely during the 19th century, the structure was rebuilt roughly 90 metres to the east, leaving its earlier foundations in the ground to the west, largely forgotten.

The site sits in the area immediately west of Abbey Cottage in Howth, within easy reach of the abbey ruins themselves, which are freely accessible and worth examining alongside this piece of the story. The buried structure is not visible above ground, so there is nothing to see at the precise spot of the assessment, but understanding that the cottage was effectively picked up and moved, leaving its 16th-century bones behind in the soil, gives the whole area a slightly different quality. Walking the line between the old foundation position and the current building, a distance of around 90 metres, you are tracing an act of architectural relocation that was commonplace enough in the 19th century but rarely leaves such legible evidence.