The structure is modest by any measure, roughly 7.4 metres long and 4.7 metres wide, but its position tells you something immediately: rather than standing alone in open ground, it was built directly into the bank of the surrounding rath, using that earthwork as one of its own walls.

A rath is a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland, typically a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead by a single family or household. At Carrownree, the house site extends inward from the south-eastern bank of just such an enclosure. Three of its sides are still traceable as low rubble stone banks, around 1.3 metres wide and 0.4 metres high, while the fourth side is formed by the rath bank itself. The interior floor sits at roughly the same level as the rest of the enclosure. No trace of the original entrance has survived, or at least none that can be clearly identified, which leaves open the question of how the occupants moved between the house and the wider enclosure, or out through the rath's perimeter entirely.