The crenellations, those battlemented parapets more commonly associated with medieval fortifications, were a fashionable affectation among nineteenth-century Irish country houses, lending a faintly martial air to what was in other respects a straightforward two-storey residence of roughly square plan, around twenty-one metres north to south and twenty metres east to west. The entrance front faces south across four bays, with a modest gabled porch and sidelights flanking the doorway, and large rectangular window openings running throughout the walls, the kind of generous glazing that signals Victorian confidence rather than defensive intent.

Sir Richard Orpen built the house in 1847, though the Orpen family connection to this particular ground was already established before then. An earlier house on the same property is recorded on the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an L-shaped structure with two parallel ranges of buildings extending to the rear, suggesting a more rambling domestic arrangement that the new build replaced and consolidated. The 1847 house itself did not survive intact into the twentieth century. It was burnt in 1921, a fate it shared with a considerable number of the Irish big houses during the War of Independence and its aftermath, when the destruction of Anglo-Irish landed estates became both a military tactic and, in some cases, an act of communal reckoning. What stands today is the roofless shell of that building, the tower still legible against the Kerry sky.