The building itself was modest, roughly four metres across at its widest, but what makes the site quietly remarkable is not any single structure but the accumulated complexity beneath the ground: at least six distinct phases of construction have been identified in this part of the hillside, each one cutting into, draining away from, or simply replacing its predecessor.

Excavations carried out in 1999 by Hayden exposed the oval house's drystone walls, a construction technique in which stones are laid without mortar, here built with some care; the outer face had stones set at right angles to the wall's line, while the inner face ran along it, with those inner stones set into a trench cut into the subsoil. At the centre of the interior sat an unlined hearth, between 1.2 and 1.6 metres across, its fill a succession of ash and charcoal layers that preserved small burnt bird and fish bones, a direct trace of what people were eating. Stake-holes around and beneath the hearth suggest that cooking vessels were suspended or propped above the fire rather than rested directly on it. A paved pathway, five metres long and lined with large flat slabs, led from the south-east doorway down the scarped hillside before turning south; embedded in this paving was half of a quernstone, the rotating hand-mill used for grinding grain, with a second quernstone fragment found on top of the wall itself. Whether that wall-top fragment was built deliberately into the structure or deposited there later, after the house fell out of use, could not be determined. The house belonged to Phase II of the sequence; it had already demolished part of an earlier house to its north-west when built, and was itself eventually replaced by another structure immediately to the west.