Excavators found a hearth, clear evidence that people once gathered around a fire in this spot, but the walls that would have enclosed that warmth left no trace conclusive enough to map. What survives is the ghost of a home: a centre point without a perimeter.

The site belongs to a cluster of five post-medieval structures uncovered by archaeological excavation, forming what appears to have been a small rural settlement of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What makes the location particularly layered is that this settlement was not built on open ground. It sits on the remains of a medieval moated site, a type of enclosed farmstead common in Ireland from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where a raised platform was surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch, marking status and providing a degree of security. By the time the post-medieval houses went up, that earlier arrangement had presumably long fallen out of use, its banks and ditches becoming simply the shape of the ground underfoot. The house in question sat to the south of the moated enclosure, immediately south of one of its neighbours in the cluster, and to its own south lay the remains of what may have been a lean-to addition, a simple secondary structure built against the main building for storage or shelter. The excavation was reported by Cotter in publications from 2003 and 2005.