The cluster stretches roughly 120 metres along a northeast-southwest axis and about 35 metres across, with a shallow ravine cutting east-west along its southern edge. What makes the site particularly arresting is not its scale but its ambiguity: the date of the settlement as a whole is officially indeterminate, and the houses carry no obvious labels of period or purpose.

One of the houses was excavated in 1991, which at least offered a partial answer. That structure turned out to belong to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, though archaeologists found traces of a possibly earlier building beneath it, suggesting the site had at least two phases of occupation. The houses sit within a multiperiod field system, meaning the boundaries and divisions of the land around them also accumulated over a long stretch of time, layer upon layer of human organisation that the eye alone cannot easily unpick. About 40 metres to the north lies the medieval church of Noughaval, set within its graveyard, a proximity that was almost certainly not accidental. In rural Ireland, settlement and ecclesiastical sites frequently developed in close relation to one another, the church providing a focal point for a surrounding community whose everyday lives were played out in structures exactly like these. The well-made stonework of the houses, with their large facing stones, suggests a degree of care and craft that goes somewhat beyond the purely functional, even if the people who built them left no written record.