Beneath the remains of a rectangular house, archaeologists found evidence of an earlier structure, circular in plan and built from driven stakes, upright timbers hammered into the ground to form the walls. The two buildings are not simply different shapes; they represent a broader architectural shift that occurred across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, as circular construction gradually gave way to the rectangular forms more familiar from later periods.

The site is listed as a National Monument, and what the excavation revealed is a rare stratigraphic snapshot of that transition. The circular house at An Lóthar preceded the rectangular one on the same ground, meaning the same community, or successive generations of it, chose to rebuild in a fundamentally different way. Driven-stake construction was a common early medieval technique, requiring no quarried stone and leaving a footprint that can be difficult to detect without careful excavation. The rectangular building that replaced it suggests a shift in domestic organisation, perhaps in how space within the home was divided and used. The Iveragh Peninsula, a landscape dense with early medieval remains, provides a fitting context for a find of this kind, where the ordinary lives of farming and fishing communities occasionally surface through the ground.