A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and they are found in considerable numbers across the west of Ireland. That this house occupies an internal position within one places it in a tradition of enclosed settlement that stretches back into early medieval Ireland, though the indeterminate date assigned to this particular structure leaves open a good deal of interpretive space.

When the site was first formally recorded in 1982, surveyors noted a roughly circular area of approximately nine metres in diameter, defined by a ruined stone wall. A handful of stones projecting outward from the northern section of the wall were tentatively identified as the springing points of a corbelled roof, the kind of construction in which stones are laid in overlapping courses, each projecting slightly inward over the one below, until the gap closes at the top without the need for a keystone or timber frame. An entrance was identified on the eastern side. By 1990, when the site was recorded again and noted in Lavelle's 1994 survey, the figures had shifted considerably: the structure was described as a circular hut site with an internal diameter of just 4.2 metres and an internal height of 1.8 metres. Whether those diverging measurements reflect different methods of survey, differing interpretations of which wall faces to measure between, or simply the gradual collapse of fabric over the intervening years, the record does not say.