It is known as St. Gobnait's House, and while that association has given it a long devotional afterlife, what lies underneath tells a rather more industrial story. The building, with a floor diameter of twenty feet and walls five feet thick, was constructed with inner and outer stone facing packed around a rubble core, its door facing south between two substantial jambstones. Those jambstones were misidentified as galláin, that is, standing stones, on the 1940 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small cartographic error that quietly persisted for years.

When the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly excavated the site in 1951, he found that the circular structure was not the first to occupy the spot. Beneath it lay evidence of an earlier rectangular wooden building, or possibly more than one, used by people engaged in iron smelting. That first structure was eventually cleared away, the ground raised by six inches to deal with persistent dampness, and the stone hut built on top. The two phases of occupation appear to have followed one another with little or no gap between them. Inside the circular building, numerous pits were associated with iron smelting debris, and the finds reflected both working and domestic life: crucibles, tuyere fragments (the nozzle-ends of bellows used to direct air into a furnace), a spindle whorl, five iron knives, whetstone and quern fragments. The only objects that might be called ornamental were an iron bead and a jet bracelet. No datable material was recovered, so the chronology of the site remains open. A small well, just six feet south of the doorway and thought to be contemporary with the hut, has since been reconstructed with a stone surround and steps leading down to the water, and is venerated as a holy well.

The site is conserved and serves today as the first station in the pilgrimage of St. Gobnait, a route still walked in the area around Ballyvourney. The well beside the door, modest in scale at eighteen inches across and two and a half feet deep, is easy to overlook, but it anchors the whole place to its long and layered use.