Before the development could proceed in 2004, archaeologists uncovered the circular footprint of a building roughly six metres across, its original timber frame long since rotted away but its memory preserved in the soil as a slot trench, a shallow channel cut to receive the upright posts and stakes that once formed the walls. Thirteen of those post- and stake-holes were still readable at the base of the trench, and a gap of about eighty centimetres in the southern arc of the structure, accompanied by a notably large post-hole to one side, most likely marks the position of a doorway, complete with a jamb post to hang the door from.

What makes the find quietly compelling is the precision with which it can be placed in time. Charred cereal grains, wheat, barley and oats, recovered from one of the stake-holes produced a radiocarbon date of 1300 to 1365 cal. AD. That places the building firmly in the fourteenth century, a period of considerable disruption in medieval Ireland, and locates it within the historic town of Glanworth, not far to the south-west of Rock Abbey, the Franciscan friary whose ruins still stand above the River Funshion. The clusters of internal stake-holes found inside the hut suggest that fitted furnishings or partitions of some kind once subdivided the interior, small details that hint at a domestic life rather than a temporary or purely functional structure. A second hut site of probable medieval date was found roughly twenty-five metres to the south-east, suggesting that what came to light here was not a solitary building but part of a small settlement cluster on the edge of the medieval town.