That discovery alone is unusual enough, but what gives the site its particular historical depth is what lay beneath the settlement itself: the five houses had been built directly on top of a medieval moated site, one community essentially folding itself into the footprint of another.

The house in question, one of the group uncovered during excavation, sat near the south-eastern corner of that earlier moated enclosure. A moated site, in the medieval Irish context, typically consisted of a residential platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch, a form of enclosed farmstead used broadly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth or seventeenth century, whoever built here was working within or around those older earthworks. What survived of the house itself was modest: the foundation course of a stone structure measuring roughly nine metres by eight, which is to say a fairly compact dwelling, its walls reduced to their lowest course by the time excavators reached them. The finds and analysis were published by Cotter in 2003 and 2005, offering the primary record of what the ground contained.