What makes this site unusual is not its grandeur but its ordinariness, the physical remains of everyday life in a thirteenth-century town, cut directly into the shale bedrock of the hillside and preserved well enough to read almost room by room.

Archaeological testing carried out in May 2019 by C. McLoughlin, followed by further excavation in October 2020, uncovered the eastern portion of a stone-walled building measuring at least 15.5 metres north to south and more than 4.4 metres east to west. The southern end appears to have had a gable wall facing onto High Hill, the kind of narrow frontage typical of urban medieval properties where plots ran back from the street. The northern wall, between one and one and a half metres wide but surviving only to around 0.4 metres in height, showed signs of a possible doorway. The eastern wall survived to a metre in height along a six-metre stretch before being cut away by a later rubble-filled pit, and the southern wall had been almost entirely robbed out, leaving only the trench where its stones once sat. A robber trench is exactly what it sounds like: the scar left behind when building stone is systematically removed for reuse elsewhere, a common fate for medieval structures in post-medieval towns.

What survives inside those walls is, in some ways, more telling than the walls themselves. The earliest floor surface was a hard grey soil mixed with charcoal flecks and flat stones, overlaid by a silty clay habitation layer suggesting repeated, long-term occupation. A roughly two-metre-square area of charcoal-rich clay may represent a hearth. Above all of this came four layers of yellow-brown clay containing charcoal, interpreted as demolition debris from the collapse or deliberate dismantling of the structure. Ceramics recovered from the occupation layers date to the thirteenth century, placing the house firmly within New Ross's period of early urban expansion. A nearby pit, roughly five metres by three and a half and over a metre deep, held medieval fill beneath later garden soil, its edges clipped on all sides by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century activity, a reminder of how densely this hillside has been used across the centuries.