About 45 metres to the north-west of Teampall Bhreacáin, one of the better-preserved churches in the group, a low and unremarkable mound sits on a terrace of the hillside. It is easy to walk past without a second glance.

What remains is a roughly rectangular outline, approximately 12.1 metres long and 6.5 metres wide, defined by a collapsed bank of earth and stone rather than any upstanding masonry. Its identification is cautious: possibly the foundations of a house. Paul Gosling, compiling the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway in 1993, recorded it in that careful, non-committal language that honest archaeology sometimes demands. The structure sits within a landscape that was clearly inhabited and organised over a long period, the church complex itself representing centuries of ecclesiastical activity, and a domestic building of this scale would not be out of place among the ancillary structures that typically clustered around early Irish monastic sites. Whether it served a secular or religious household function is unknown.

Because so little survives above ground, the most a visitor can do is stand on the terrace, look back towards the grey gables of Teampall Bhreacáin, and try to read the slight rise and fall of the ground for what it once was. The bank is collapsed and the shape approximate, but the dimensions, modest and practical, suggest something built for habitation rather than ceremony.