The ground gives nothing away; there is no earthwork, no upstanding stone, no depression in the turf. The only hint that something was ever there came from the air, when a 1977 aerial photograph revealed the site as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears when buried features cause overlying vegetation to grow or dry out at slightly different rates from the surrounding soil.

The house only came to light properly in 1982, when excavation was carried out ahead of the construction of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline. What the excavators found, recorded under excavation number E00246 and subsequently published by Doody, was a circular structure roughly three metres in diameter, defined by a shallow foundation trench cut into the earth. Within that trench, four irregularly spaced post-holes marked where upright timbers had once supported the walls or roof. The entrance was on the southern side, a gap of about 0.6 metres in the trench, with a more substantial post-hole on each flank, suggesting a framed doorway of some kind. Two further Bronze Age structures were found close by, one approximately four metres to the east and another four metres to the south, suggesting this was not a solitary dwelling but part of a small cluster of buildings, a Bronze Age settlement reduced now to nothing more than patterns in the subsoil.