Nobody knows exactly when someone lived here. The structure is modest in its surviving form, a subcircular ring roughly 9.5 metres across, its bank of stone and earth just wide enough to step over and barely a hand's breadth above the interior ground level. But the interior is slightly dished, that gentle saucer-shaped depression that forms over centuries as a floor is used, weathered, and slowly abandoned, and it speaks quietly of repeated, ordinary occupation.

The house sits inside a bivallate rath, a type of circular enclosure defined by two concentric banks and ditches, common across early medieval Ireland as a form of enclosed farmstead. This particular rath occupies the summit of a ridge running roughly west-southwest to east-northeast, set in what is now marshy pasture. It was recorded on the 1916 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked with hachures, the short lines cartographers used to indicate earthen banks and mounds. The house site lies at the very centre of the enclosure, which is itself an arrangement that appears across similar sites, placing domestic life at the protected core of the ringed space. The double-bank arrangement of a bivallate rath would have offered additional security or perhaps indicated a household of some local standing, though the date of occupation at Knocknaraha remains unresolved.