The qualification matters here: these are possible house remains, one of four such candidate structures identified within the inner enclosure of Dún Aonghasa, the great Iron Age cliff fort on the island's southern edge. That the stones survive at all is partly a matter of accident, and what survives tells only a partial story.

The remains, catalogued as Structure 10, came to light during excavations in the south-western part of Cutting 1, inside the inner enclosure of Dún Aonghasa. The arc of walling sat in the north-north-western sector of the projected structure, and was found stratified over the fill of an earlier feature, Structure 1, suggesting that whatever building this belonged to postdated at least one earlier phase of activity on the same ground. There was no associated stratigraphy, meaning no surrounding deposits that could confirm how the stones related to other material in time. What makes the identification as a house plausible, if tentative, is the relationship between the walling and a hearth recorded a short distance away in the eastern sector: if the arc is extended into a projected ground plan, it would neatly enclose that hearth. A hearth at the centre of a domestic space is one of the most consistent features of early medieval Irish housing, where small, roughly circular or sub-rectangular structures were built from stone or timber around a central or slightly off-centre fire. The geometry, in other words, fits. The excavation findings were published by Claire Cotter in 2012, drawing together years of work at one of the most extensively studied prehistoric and early medieval sites in the country.