The house itself sits within a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure common across early medieval Ireland, and forms part of a cluster of structures at the site known as Caherbaun, or An Chathair Bhán, overlooking the valley of the Owencashla river. What makes this particular building worth pausing over is not its dimensions, though it is a decent size at roughly 8.2 metres east to west and nearly 4 metres north to south, but rather what was discovered when someone cleared the floor in the western section and found a souterrain hidden beneath.

A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, built using dry-laid masonry without mortar, and examples are found across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. Their purpose is still debated, with theories ranging from food storage to refuge in times of danger. The one at Caherbaun is modest but intriguing. The passage runs north to south for a visible length of 1.4 metres and, when probed, was found to continue for at least another metre before becoming blocked. It is 0.7 metres wide and begins at around 0.3 metres deep, though it deepens noticeably toward its southern end. The house above it is built of drystone, with walls around a metre thick that have largely fallen, surviving at best to 0.75 metres on the interior face. An entrance 0.85 metres wide opens through the north wall, and there are faint traces suggesting an internal dividing wall may once have existed, though the excavation of the souterrain made that difficult to confirm. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey.