What makes this place unusual is not the house itself but the layering beneath and around it. When excavations led by Hayden were carried out in 1997 and 1998, the dig revealed that this single structure was only one episode in a sequence of at least six phases of construction on this part of the headland, each generation of building cutting into, overlying, or otherwise entangled with the last.

The house was built of drystone walling along its northern arc, with slab-lined walls elsewhere retaining a core of earth and sod. Inside, four post-holes parallel to the walls may have supported a ring of roof timbers, while a closely set arc of stake-holes along the inner face of the north wall could represent a wattle screen or a form of benching. Near the doorway, which opened to the south-east and was originally lined with large upright slabs, two perforated flagstones had been laid as paving; these are thought to have functioned as hanging-eyes, holding the upper spindles of the door. A stone-flagged pathway of about 3.5 metres extended outward from the entrance. Beneath the house, predating its walls entirely, lay a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage or chamber of a kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, likely used for storage or refuge. Charcoal samples taken from drains associated with the site suggest a date in the 6th or 7th century AD, consistent with comparable excavated structures elsewhere in the area. The house itself post-dated a nearby enclosure, cut through an earlier house to its south, and was in turn superseded by a later one, with an annular wall from an adjacent structure cutting across its north-east foundation trench. The cumulative picture is of a place that was continuously reoccupied, rebuilt, and reorganised across many generations.