The combination is quietly odd: a rath is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically of early medieval date, built as a farmstead and in many cases later associated in local memory with the otherworld. To put a domestic building inside one, rather than beside it or at a cautious distance, runs against the more common pattern.

The building itself is modest and sub-rectangular, measuring roughly 3.7 metres northeast to southwest and about 7.6 metres on its longer northwest to southeast axis. Its walls survive to between 0.75 and one metre in height on the southeast and southwest sides, while the northwest end is open and the northeast side is defined by a field wall of comparatively recent construction, one that cuts straight through the rath without much regard for what it bisects. The building appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which places it firmly in the post-medieval vernacular tradition rather than among the older features of the site. It is the kind of structure that would have been a working rural house, probably small and unceiled, typical of the west of Ireland before the Famine reshaped so much of the landscape. That it was sited within the rath may reflect simple practicality, the earthen banks offering shelter or a ready-made boundary, or it may reflect a more complex relationship between the people who lived there and the older ground beneath them.