What archaeologists found in 1999, when excavation first broke into this part of the hillside, was a curvilinear slot trench, a narrow channel cut into the earth to receive the timber or post framework of a rounded wall. That trench, just 25 centimetres wide and 15 centimetres deep, traced the north-east arc of an early medieval house. The north-west portion had been erased entirely by a later building constructed directly on top, and a pathway associated with that same later structure had worked its way into the south-east section too. What remained was, in essence, a partial curve in the ground, enough to establish that a house had stood here, but not much more.

The excavation, carried out by Hayden in 1999, placed this house within the earliest layer of a remarkably compressed sequence of occupation. Across this particular area of Bray Head, at least six distinct phases of construction were identified one above another, the kind of stratigraphic layering where each generation of builders seems to have regarded the previous settlement as simply a foundation for their own. This house and a companion structure nearby were assigned to Phase I, the oldest identifiable period in that sequence. Both were subsequently overlain by a later house belonging to Phase II. Roughly five metres to the north, the arc of an enclosure, the sort of boundary feature sometimes used to define a domestic or agricultural space around a dwelling, may have belonged to the same household arrangement, though the relationship remains tentative.

There is little here that a visitor would see with the naked eye; the excavated features have long since been backfilled. The significance lies less in what is visible than in what the dig revealed about continuous, layered human activity on this Atlantic headland across the early medieval centuries, each phase of life quietly pressing down on the one before it.