The building had been erased in 1929 to make way for a convent, and what the dig uncovered was the ghost of something substantial: foundations about a metre wide, walls solid enough to have supported a structure two or three storeys tall, oriented with its narrow gable end pushed right up to the street frontage in the manner typical of urban buildings of the period.

The excavation established a construction date somewhere in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, placing the house among the surviving fabric of post-medieval Cashel, a town already ancient by that point and dominated by the famous Rock overhead. Measuring fourteen metres along its main axis and just over seven metres across, it was not a grand residence but a serious, well-built urban dwelling. The finds associated with the site pointed to continuous occupation from the time of its construction right through to its demolition, meaning that for around three hundred years, through the upheavals of the seventeenth century, the Penal era, the Famine, and the slow transformation of Irish provincial towns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, someone was living there. The 1929 clearance was routine enough at the time, the kind of practical decision that removed countless old buildings to make space for newer institutional ones, with no particular sense that anything was being lost. It was only the 1997 excavations, reported by O'Donovan, that gave the building back some of its material reality.