The structure was known to its excavators as the 'Western House', and what makes it quietly odd is that the building above ground raises more questions than it answers. When Robert Macalister and Robert Lloyd Praeger dug here in 1928, they found that so many stones had been robbed away over the centuries that they could not determine whether the walls had once risen vertically to support a timber roof, or curved inward in an oversailing fashion to form something closer to a dome.

Macalister and Praeger recorded the upper chamber's internal dimensions as roughly 5.18 metres north to south and 4.57 metres east to west, with walls varying considerably in thickness, from 1.37 metres at the north-west angle to a substantial 1.8 metres at the south-east. The variation is suggestive but unexplained. The site sits within a conjoined enclosure on Uisneach, a hill long regarded as a ceremonial and political centre of early Ireland, and it is surrounded by a dense cluster of monuments. Within a few hundred metres lie a mound barrow, several earthworks, a ringfort, a holy well, an embanked roadway described on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map simply as 'ancient road', and a ritual pond called Loch Lugh. That same map depicts the enclosure as a large circular ringfort with a D-shaped annexe, and marks a cave at its centre, which corresponds to the souterrain. The rectangular platform that appears to be the hut foundations is visible in the southern quadrant of the ringfort interior. Rua Schot's re-interpretation of the 1928 excavation, published in 2006, has added a further layer of analysis to what Macalister and Praeger left behind, though the essential uncertainties about the structure's original form remain unresolved.