A cashel is a type of early medieval stone ringfort, its perimeter wall enclosing a defined domestic or agricultural space, and this particular house site sits in the south-western sector of that enclosure, so close to the cashel wall that its own south-western end may once have abutted it directly.

The structure itself is modest and poorly preserved, measuring roughly five metres in length and just over two metres in internal width, its stone walls surviving to a height of about ninety centimetres. What makes it quietly complicated is its paper trail. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the 1830s, records it as a roofed building, which means people were living there within recent memory of the surveyors. Thomas Johnson Westropp, the antiquarian and prolific recorder of Irish monuments, noted both this structure and a companion house in the south-eastern sector of the cashel on his 1905 plan of Caherdoon, describing them as "two modern huts, inhabited down to very recent times." That phrase, though, carries a caveat. The word "modern" in Westropp's usage likely meant simply that the huts were not ancient in form, but the occupation he observed may not have been new occupation at all. It may instead reflect a long, quiet continuity of use within the cashel walls, or perhaps a series of reuses over generations, each leaving little trace of itself in the fabric of the stone.