What makes the site genuinely arresting is not its age alone but the sophistication of what was found beneath the floor: a carefully engineered drainage system, with an unlined internal drain feeding into a central sump, then splitting into two channels that merged again before passing under the wall and dividing once more into three separate outlets outside the building. For a structure measuring roughly five metres by five metres, that is a remarkable amount of hydraulic thinking.

Excavated in 1998, the house was built from drystone masonry, a technique using dry-laid stones without mortar, with walls between 0.7 and 0.8 metres thick. Its builders had cut a shallow trench into the hillslope to level the ground, and the north wall was partially defined by a trench dug into the upslope itself. A hearth in the south-west corner marks where the household fire burned. Stake-holes found inside may predate the structure entirely, hinting at earlier, less permanent occupation of the same spot. Radiocarbon dating placed the house in the 9th to 11th century AD, and analysis by Hayden in 1999 identified it as probably the earliest rectangular house within a wider complex on Bray Head. That complex was not static: the excavation revealed at least six successive phases of construction in the immediate area, and this house belonged to Phase IV of that sequence. A later building was eventually raised directly over its unexcavated southern side, which is why that portion of the structure was left untouched. Inside the house itself, evidence of at least two phases of use survives, including a refloored interior and a second hearth that partly overlay a pit cut into the original floor.