The structure measures roughly sixteen metres east to west and just over four metres north to south, which gives it an unusually elongated footprint. Its walls were built in double-faced rubble masonry, meaning two outer faces of stone with rubble packed between them, though by the time excavators reached it only a single course of walling survived in places. Stranger still, the corners behave differently depending on which side of the wall you stand: rounded on the outside, angled within. No trace of a doorway was ever found.

The site was excavated twice, in 1950 and again in 1953, by M. V. Duignan, as part of a broader investigation that uncovered two other house sites nearby within the same enclosure. An ecclesiastical enclosure of this kind would typically mark the boundary of an early monastic or church settlement, and this building sits right up against its south-eastern wall, as though squeezed in at a later date. Duignan's conclusion was that the house did not belong to the earliest phase of activity on the site, suggesting it was a later addition to a place already long in use. The finds recovered from the interior support that reading, in their own scattered way: animal bone fragments and oyster shells sit alongside a fragment of a quernstone, used for grinding grain, and an iron looped pin that may date to the early medieval period. The range of material spans from the early medieval centuries through to modern times, leaving the building's precise moment of construction somewhere in that long, unresolved interval.