The site had never appeared on any historical Ordnance Survey maps, and its existence was entirely unknown until excavations carried out in 1977 and 1978, ahead of construction work, exposed the remains of not one but two houses just twenty metres apart. The one recorded as House I is the more revealing of the pair, and what it contained says a great deal about the people who lived there and how they managed the ordinary difficulties of daily life.

Archaeologist Rose Cleary documented House I in detail, describing a sub-rectangular structure measuring 14.5 metres east to west and 7.6 metres north to south, apparently a single room with no surviving evidence of internal divisions. The walls were almost certainly built from mud, possibly reinforced with post and wattle, and they may have been up to 1.5 metres thick. What makes this particularly interesting is that over 500 large fragments of animal bone were mixed into the mud as temper, a technique used to prevent the walls from cracking as they dried. A stone-built hearth sat along the southern wall, with closely set paving laid out before it across the clay floor. Drainage was handled by a stone-lined channel in the northwest corner, which ran out under the wall to an external pit. A second, larger pit to the south of the house, measuring 4.5 metres long, showed traces of human waste on the animal bone found inside it, indicating it served as a latrine. Dating the house relies on fragments of green-glazed pottery recovered during excavation, including decorated jugs produced in the Limerick area and assignable to the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Among the smaller finds was a bone die, its faces marked with dot-and-circle impressions and its surfaces worn smooth from handling.

The site sits on a west-facing slope above the old lakeshore of Lough Gur, now at the southern end of the visitor centre car park. The excavated remains themselves are no longer visible above ground, but the landscape around them rewards attention. Within a short radius lie a crannóg (an artificial island settlement) on Bolin Island to the northwest, the early medieval enclosure complex known as the Spectacles at Drumlaegh to the north-northeast, a bullaun stone to the southeast, a bullaun being a boulder with a cup-shaped hollow often associated with early Christian sites, and Bourchier's Castle to the southwest. The whole area around Lough Gur represents one of the most densely layered archaeological zones in Ireland, with activity spanning from the Neolithic to the present.