The building had been sunk roughly a metre into the ground, its lower walls carefully stone-built and backed against undisturbed clay, its southern floor half-paved with large flat stones. A ridge-pole had once run the length of the roof, supported by post-holes still visible in the floor. None of that was especially unusual. What puzzled the excavator was the western end, where the walls curved inward but never met, leaving a gap of about 1.2 metres, and beyond that gap, a broad shallow trench cut into the boulder clay, leading to an irregular hollow. During the dig, a continuous stream of water ran down the middle of the floor and filled that hollow. The thought arose, and was cautiously set aside, that the hollow might have served as a bathing pool, and the structure beside it as some kind of bathhouse.

The site sits within the Cush archaeological complex, a dense cluster of ring-forts, enclosures, and house sites in the southern group on Slievereagh, a hill known in Irish as Sliabh Riabhach. Scholars including T. J. Westropp identified the area as the supposed site of Temaír Erann, the ancient cemetery of the Ernai tribe, a detail that lends the wider landscape a ceremonial gravity even where individual structures resist neat interpretation. The house in question, designated House b, was excavated by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and published in 1940. It lay in the south-east quadrant of a rectangular enclosure bounded on three sides by a bank and fosse, with a group of conjoined ring-forts forming the fourth side. A fosse, for those unfamiliar with the term, is simply a defensive ditch. House b had been built directly into a silted-up example of one, and at its south-east corner the walls trailed off into that old ditch for about five feet, forming a narrow passage whose purpose, entrance or annexe, was never resolved. Ó Ríordáin noted that the construction was entirely unlike any other house found at Cush, though without datable finds the structure carries no firm period.

The site today lies in rough pasture, and the excavated features have long since been backfilled, so there is nothing visible above ground to mark where House b once stood. The wider Cush complex on Slievereagh does retain earthwork features that can be traced across the hillside, and the landscape itself, open, elevated, with the kind of long views that make field boundaries and earthworks legible, rewards careful looking. The site is not formally managed or signposted, and access across farmland should be approached with the usual consideration. Those with a particular interest in the excavation can consult Ó Ríordáin's 1940 publication directly, which includes plans and photographs of the structure as it appeared in the ground.