A lean-to farm building has been constructed against the northeast side, pressing up against the ruin as though holding it in place. Yet even in this reduced state the wall preserves an unusual degree of domestic detail, enough to read the interior life of the building with some precision. Two polished limestone fireplaces survive at first-floor level, positioned close enough to each wall that the original space was almost certainly divided into two separate chambers. A large ground-floor fireplace, 2.5 metres wide with a segmental arch of dressed voussoirs, still has its wall oven intact within the northwest jamb. The corbels that once supported wooden floors project from the wall, with beam-holes answering them from what little remains of the northeast and southeast returns.

The house sits on a flat valley floor in County Kilkenny, with the Tifeaghna River passing immediately to the southwest and good views extending in all directions from the slight elevation of the surrounding land. Its history reaches back at least as far as the mid-seventeenth century. The Down Survey parish map of 1655 to 1656 marks it plainly as "a stone house called the Lodge," and the associated terrier notes that on the Parke of Ballin there was "a stone house in repaire," suggesting it was functional, if not necessarily thriving, at that time. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan was fairly dismissive, calling it "a square building of no great consequence, though of considerable height" and placing its construction no earlier than the close of the sixteenth century. That assessment of its architectural ambitions may be fair, but it undersells the building's interest as a piece of evidence. The roughly coursed rubble masonry, the steeply pitched roofline preserved in the surviving gable, and the careful limestone window surround at first-floor level, chamfered externally with traces of smooth plaster still clinging to the upper band, all point to a household of modest but real means, probably built in the late sixteenth or very early seventeenth century.