By the time anyone thought to look for it at ground level, in 2000, it had already been erased. Land reclamation had levelled not only the house itself but the network of field walls that once surrounded it, leaving no visible trace on the surface. What we know of it comes entirely from a scale plan drawn up in 1986, which captured its dimensions and position with some precision before the ground was cleared.

The plan recorded a modest structure, roughly eight to ten metres along its east-west axis and four to five metres across, divided internally into two rooms. It sat in the south-west quadrant of a subrectangular field that curved around the southern arc of a nearby cashel, a type of early stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. The cashel itself lies approximately twenty-five metres to the north. The house was not freestanding within this field; its south-west corner pressed against the curving outer wall, and a further subdivision wall abutted its north-east end, suggesting the space around it had been carefully parcelled into smaller enclosures, each with some distinct agricultural or domestic purpose. The date of the house remains unresolved, a consequence of it disappearing before it could be properly examined rather than any failure of the historical record to care about it.

What makes Caherwiclaun worth pausing over is the gap between the documentary precision of that 1986 plan and the complete absence of anything to see today. The relationship between the house and the cashel, the way walls abutted and subdivided the surrounding field, suggests a coherent settlement landscape that was still legible in the mid-1980s, and then was not.