The stack measures 3.2 metres wide and 1.2 metres long, faced on both sides with roughly coursed limestone rubble, and it still carries the ghost of two fireplaces, one on the north-east face and one on the south-west, each of which once heated a separate ground-floor room. That a chimney stack should outlast everything else about a building is not so unusual; what makes this one more curious is the evidence of how it was constructed in the first place.

Archaeological analysis of the remains suggests the stack was raised as a freestanding structure before any walls were built around it, meaning the house was effectively organised around its own hearth from the very beginning. The plan that emerges from this is straightforward: two ground-floor rooms arranged along a north-east to south-west axis, with a central door positioned directly in front of the chimney stack and giving access to either room. It is a compact, practical layout, and a closely comparable example survives at Ballynamire, not far away in the same county. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which dates to the nineteenth century, labels the Clonbeg site as a convent, a designation that has since been set aside in favour of the more prosaic reading of a probable seventeenth-century farmhouse. Whether the convent label reflects a genuine earlier use, a local tradition, or simply a cartographic error is not recorded.