What makes the site quietly remarkable is not any single feature but the density of human activity compressed into a relatively small area of headland: the ground here was built upon, abandoned, rebuilt, and built upon again across at least six distinct phases of construction, each generation of inhabitants partly erasing the one before.

Excavations carried out in 1997 and 1998, directed by Hayden, uncovered the surviving remains of a house measuring roughly 5.8 metres north to south and 5.2 metres east to west. Its walls were constructed in a hybrid technique, with slab-lined, sod-core sections forming the northern and western sides, while the upper courses appear to have been finished in horizontally laid drystone masonry. The building had been scarped, meaning it was cut 0.6 metres into the uphill slope so that the floor would sit roughly horizontal on the gradient of the headland. Three of the internal corners were rounded, as was common in early medieval Irish domestic architecture, while the north-west corner alone was right-angled. A doorway opened in the east wall. Inside, four small capped drains converged at that doorway and then continued in a winding course southward towards a neighbouring house, where the drain ended abruptly. Whether it was ever connected to what lay beyond, or was simply abandoned mid-course, is unclear. At the centre of the floor, oxidised subsoil beneath burnt material pointed to a hearth. Seventeen stake-holes to the east of centre formed no obvious pattern but probably marked the repeated placing or replacement of some internal fitting, perhaps a partition or a piece of furniture. Secondary burnt deposits had spread through the doorway and over the drain, suggesting at least one episode of fire after the house had gone out of regular use. The building of this house had itself removed the northern portion of an even earlier structure beneath it, and it belonged to Phase IV in the sequence, meaning at least three further phases of activity had followed it.