The foundations are slight, rising no more than thirty centimetres at their highest point, yet they describe a building of reasonable size: thirteen and a half metres long, eight and a half metres wide, oriented along a north-north-west to south-south-east axis. What makes the site quietly compelling is not what survives but what was once recorded. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most methodical cartographic efforts ever undertaken in Ireland and a document that caught thousands of structures at various stages of use and abandonment, shows this building as roofed. That means that within living memory of the surveyors, someone was still under that roof, in the shadow of the tower house next door.

The relationship between the two structures is not fully understood. Tower houses, the compact fortified residences that proliferated across late medieval Ireland between roughly the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, were often accompanied by ancillary buildings, including halls, domestic outbuildings, and sometimes clusters of settlement that have since largely vanished into the ground. Whether this building functioned as part of such a complex, or represented a later separate occupation of the same ground, is not known. Two further possible house sites lie to the west and north-west of this one, suggesting that what remains here is a fragment of a wider pattern of habitation that has yet to be fully traced.