No mound, no earthwork, no surface irregularity gives it away. What first revealed it was a cropmark spotted on an aerial photograph taken in May 1977, those subtle variations in vegetation colour and growth that betray buried features to a camera lens in a way they never would to a person walking the ground.

The house itself was excavated ahead of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline in 1982, and investigated again in 1987. What emerged from the soil was a circular structure roughly 6.5 metres in diameter, its outline defined by ten post-holes spaced about a metre apart around the perimeter. Three post-holes on the north-east side likely mark where a doorway stood, about 1.2 metres wide, and a further outlying post-hole just outside suggests some kind of porch or windbreak sheltering the entrance. Inside, a central hearth dominated the floor space, and clusters of stake-holes point to a cooking spit that was dismantled and repositioned several times over the course of the building's life. Eight pits were found within and just inside the entrance, thought to have started as storage pits and gradually repurposed as places to deposit rubbish. The finds were sparse: two sherds of pottery and a single stone object. Charcoal recovered from one of the pits was radiocarbon dated to somewhere between 1041 and 937 BC, placing the house firmly in the middle of the Bronze Age. The structure does not stand alone either. It was built over the western portion of an even earlier Bronze Age house, and another possible house sits roughly eight metres to the south-south-west, hinting at a small cluster of domestic occupation on this quiet Tipperary slope across a considerable stretch of prehistoric time.