The structure was not discovered through local legend or antiquarian curiosity, but through an excavation at Station Road, carried out under licence number 08E0376, which gradually revealed one of the more quietly absorbing windows into late medieval domestic life on the Dublin coast.

What the excavators found was an extensive settlement measuring roughly 50 to 70 metres north to south and 110 metres east to west, organised into six distinct property plots separated by linear ditches. Each plot was divided into a toft and a croft, terms that describe, respectively, the area immediately around a house where daily domestic activity took place, and the longer strip of land behind it used for cultivation or other purposes. The structure described here sat within Plot 2, a long, narrow holding defined by shallow inter-cutting ditches. Its own footprint was modest, a sub-rectangular space of around six metres by seven metres, with shallow foundation cuts that still held some wall stones in place, including a foundation pad. A packed floor and a spread of charcoal survived in the interior, though the whole had been badly disturbed by 17th-century ditching and pitting. Radiocarbon analysis, reported by Moriarty in 2009, placed the main occupation of the wider settlement in the 16th to 17th century. The artefact assemblage recovered across the excavation was substantial: over 2,000 sherds of medieval pottery, largely Leinster cooking ware and Dublin-type wares produced locally, along with more than 3,000 metal objects. Food waste told its own story, with butchered animal bone, carbonised grains, and quantities of shellfish, cockles, mussels, oysters, periwinkles, and razor shells, suggesting a community with ready access to the nearby shore.

There is nothing to see above ground at the Station Road site today. The value of places like this lies not in any surviving visible fabric but in the record they have left behind. For those interested in following up the excavation findings, the National Monuments Service entry for the site and the published report by Moriarty are the most direct routes into the detail. The surrounding area of Portmarnock, close to the coast north of Dublin, gives some geographical sense of why a settlement here would have had shellfish on the menu and Dublin-type pottery in the kitchen.