Measuring roughly six metres east to west and four metres north to south, the structure was set at the centre of a larger Bronze Age enclosure, a placement that, combined with its unusual construction method, led the excavating archaeologist to suggest it may have served a communal or ritual function rather than simply housing a family.

The building came to light in 2003 during excavations carried out ahead of the construction of the N8 Rathcormac-Fermoy Bypass, work that opened up a stretch of landscape that had been largely undisturbed since the Bronze Age. What the excavators found was the ghost of a building: a slot-trench, the narrow channel cut to hold the base of a timber wall, along with a series of post-holes marking where upright timbers once stood. Two substantial central post-holes indicated that the roof was supported by a pair of hefty internal posts rather than relying entirely on the walls, a structural approach that set this building apart from the other houses excavated nearby. The south-facing entrance was framed by two more large post-holes, and tucked among the packing-stones holding one of them in place was a fragment of a saddle quern, a flat stone used for grinding grain, repurposed here as simple building rubble or perhaps something more deliberate. Around thirty-three sherds of Bronze Age pottery, mostly from two separate vessels, were recovered in and around the structure. One of the central post-holes was radiocarbon dated to between 1750 and 1520 cal. BC, placing the building firmly in the Middle Bronze Age. A possible corn-drying kiln was identified to the south-east of the house. The western side of the slot-trench had been disrupted by later field boundary ditches and, of all things, extensive rabbit burrowing, meaning the full original outline of the structure could not be traced.