What makes the site quietly unusual is not just the structure itself, but where it was built: inside a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement that by the 17th century had been out of use for the best part of a millennium. Someone chose to plant a new house within the earthen banks of a much older enclosure, borrowing its boundary for reasons that can only be guessed at now.

The house is oriented on a north-south axis and takes up most of the interior of the enclosure. Entrance gaps survive at the southern end of both the east and west walls, placed directly opposite each other, which would have created a through-passage of sorts at that end of the building. Faint traces of an internal division suggest the space was split into two rooms, a modest but functional arrangement consistent with rural domestic building of the period. The plan is best read from the south or south-west, where the footings are most legible. A second, sub-rectangular platform in the southern part of the ringfort interior may point to an earlier or associated hut site, adding another layer to an already layered landscape. The country house recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Gaulstown sits roughly 220 metres to the north-north-east, a reminder that this low hill once sat within a working agricultural and social landscape, not an isolated ruin at the edge of things. From the site, views extend north, east, and south across the Westmeath countryside, which may well explain why both the ringfort builders and their much later successors found the spot worth occupying.