The structure is a former fever hospital, the kind of institution that formed a grim but necessary part of Irish provincial life in the nineteenth century, when epidemic diseases such as typhus moved rapidly through overcrowded and undernourished communities. Beside the entrance gate, an abandoned one-storey dispensary still stands, roofless or otherwise disused, a quiet remnant that sits awkwardly alongside the building's current, more sociable purpose.

By 1837, when the topographer Samuel Lewis was compiling his monumental Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, the hospital was already operational and apparently well-organised for its time. Lewis recorded that it was "adapted to the reception of 50 patients" and that it had "a ward attached to it for surgical cases," a detail suggesting the facility was intended to handle more than fever alone. The building itself is architecturally coherent in the manner of institutional construction of that period: a three-bay north-facing front elevation with a deep hipped projection at each end, the kind of restrained, functional symmetry that Victorian-era public buildings in Ireland tended to favour. Later additions, including gabled extensions to the front and more extensive building to the rear, have altered the original outline without entirely obscuring it.