What makes it quietly puzzling is that nobody can say with confidence when it was built, who lived in it, or even where its door was. The archaeology simply does not resolve those questions, and the finds recovered during excavation span such a broad period that they resist any neat interpretation.

The structure measures roughly 8.59 metres east to west and 6.46 metres north to south, with double-faced drystone walls, meaning two outer skins of stone with rubble packed between them, running between 0.97 and 1.22 metres thick. It was one of three house sites excavated by Duignan in 1950 and 1953, all of them sitting within the same ecclesiastical enclosure at Kiltiernan, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that once defined an early Irish monastic or church settlement. The internal corners of the surviving walls were angled rather than fully rounded, though the one intact external corner, at the north-east, appeared to be rounded on the outside. Among the objects found was a bronze strap mount, possibly of medieval date, though the broader finds assemblage points to occupation, or at least use, across a wide and indeterminate span of time. The results of the excavations were discussed by Waddell and Clyne in 1995, but even with that analysis the building resists confident dating.