The uncertainty is itself the point of interest. What survives is a subrectangular area measuring roughly 4.6 metres north to south and approximately 15 metres east to west, defined along its northern edge by a bank around 15 metres long and 3 metres wide, which runs eastward to meet the inner face of the enclosing rath bank at the south-east. A further low bank marks the western side and the south-west corner. It may be the floor plan of a house, the kind of modest domestic structure that once occupied the sheltered interiors of raths across early medieval Ireland. Or it may be nothing more than an internal division, a way of partitioning space within the enclosure for purposes that are now entirely lost.

A rath, also known as a ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and was the standard settlement type in early medieval Ireland, typically associated with farming families of middling rank. The one at Dunowla contains what appears to be a cluster of related structures. The possible house in question sits in the southern half of the rath's interior, abutting the north-east side of another possible house nearby, with a further possible hut site recorded to the north-west. The grouping suggests that whatever activity took place within this enclosure, it was not simple or singular, though the date of any of it remains undetermined. The careful hedging in how these features are described reflects an honest archaeological position: the banks are real, the shapes they form are suggestive, but the evidence stops well short of certainty.