The enclosure is a bawn, a fortified courtyard wall of the kind built by settlers and established landowners from the late medieval period onwards as a means of protecting livestock and household alike. This one is constructed in roughly coursed limestone rubble with a base batter, meaning the wall is slightly angled outward at its foot to increase stability and make undermining more difficult. The gate tower still stands at the centre of the north wall, projecting outward and flanked by musket loops, small angled apertures designed to allow a defender to fire outward while remaining largely sheltered. One of those loops has since been blocked by a later rebuild of the wall, almost certainly during 19th-century modifications to the complex.

The bawn encloses several layers of occupation. In the north-west angle stands a tower house, the earlier fortified residence, now reduced to a single storey but retaining a transomed and mullioned window in the Jacobean style on its west face, a detail that places construction firmly in the early 17th century. At the north-east angle there is evidence of a bartizan, a small corbelled turret carried on projecting stones on the outer face of the wall. At the south-east angle, a flanking turret of 6.6 metres external diameter survives only as foundations. Alongside these earlier structures, a small two-storey T-plan house was erected within the bawn at some point in the later 17th century, with a 19th-century extension added at its north end. One of its more telling features is a narrow stair tower projecting from the rear of the house, which provided the only means of reaching the first floor, an arrangement typical of late 17th and early 18th-century Irish domestic building, when convenience was still competing with caution. The site appears on the Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656, the Cromwellian-era land census that recorded property across Ireland in extraordinary detail, suggesting the complex was well established by the mid-17th century at the latest.