The structure, a bow-sided, subrectangular house measuring roughly six to six and a half metres long and three to four metres wide, belongs to a building tradition associated with Viking and Hiberno-Norse settlement. Bow-sided simply means the long walls curve outward slightly rather than running straight, a characteristic form found across the Norse world. That such a house should turn up on a windswept Atlantic headland in County Kerry is the quietly startling part.

The excavation, carried out by Hayden in 2000, revealed the building through its post-holes and stake-holes, the only traces left once timber rots away. The northern wall had been cut into the hillslope for stability, a practical response to the sloping ground. Inside, a large hearth sat at the centre of the floor, with a flat, fire-cracked stone on its northern side that was probably used as a baking stone, and clusters of small stake-holes nearby suggesting the former presence of cooking spits. A narrow slot and further stake-holes just inside the western wall may represent some form of insulation lining. The house had an internal partition, though only a single line of stake-holes survived to indicate it, and a drainage system of small stone-capped channels ran from the northern wall out through the south, with a sump in the eastern part of the floor. The doorway was most likely in the centre of the eastern wall, where a bifurcated drain, one that split into two channels, was found. The excavator noted that the bow-sided form finds its closest parallels in Viking houses from Scotland and the Isle of Man. After the building was abandoned, a layer of water-deposited silt accumulated over its remains, suggesting a significant gap in time before a later stone-built house was constructed on the same site, partially overlying the earlier structure's northern wall.