Together they form a pair of beehive structures, the corbelled, roughly circular form found at early monastic and settlement sites along the western Atlantic seaboard. One of the pair, known from excavation records as House B, is the more fragmentary of the two; by the time anyone came to study it properly, it had already been reduced to its western half, and even that was on the verge of collapse.

Françoise Henry, the French art historian and scholar of early Irish Christianity, excavated the site in 1938. She found the structure so disturbed that it was difficult, in her own words, to discriminate between modern additions and old walls. What she could establish was suggestive. A later internal wall, built across the abandoned floor on a roughly north-south axis, had been constructed not for habitation but to prop up a cross slab carved with a crucifixion scene, an act of repurposing that in the process destroyed much of the original habitation layers, including the hearth. Scattered deposits of black soil, charcoal, bones and shell survived in places. Among the finds were a pottery sherd, a bone point, a fragment of iron with bronze on it, and three silver pennies of late twelfth-century date, two minted in London and one in Canterbury, small objects that place the site within a wider medieval world of trade and movement. Four cross slabs in total were found associated with the house, none in its original position. One, incised with a cross whose shaft ends in Y-shaped terminals, was lying near the entrance, and Henry suggested it may once have served as the door lintel. House B is a National Monument in state ownership, and sits within a cluster of similar structures on the Bailey Mór, with further house remains just to the north and south-east.