It is the kind of ruin that rewards attention not for its scale but for the domestic particulars that have been recorded about it: curved balustrades on the entrance steps, small square panes in heavy wooden settings at the rear windows, a corner fireplace tucked into one of the four parlours, and a staircase window that lit an oblong hall. These details survive only on paper now, but they sketch a house that was genuinely considered and lived in, rather than merely erected.

The Bowen family built Kilbolane House around 1695, and their previous accommodation puts the ambition of the new building into context. Before it was constructed, the family had been living in a lean-to structure built against the interior walls of the adjacent medieval castle, roughly a hundred metres to the south-east. The move into a proper two-storey house over a basement, with a five-bay front elevation facing south, represented a considerable change in circumstance. At some point the facade was updated: a central breakfront, one bay wide, was added with a Wyatt window, a large tripartite window popular in late Georgian architecture, and the original front windows were replaced with eighteenth-century sash windows, while the rear retained its earlier glazing. The house appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Kilbolane House, suggesting it was still a functioning residence at that point, though it is now reduced to those foundations and that fragment of wall.

The surrounding remnants are worth noting. Two-storey L-shaped farm buildings still stand on the property, distinguished by D-shaped first-floor windows. Across the road from the entrance, an abandoned gate lodge survives, three bays wide and single-storeyed, with a hipped roof and an ogee-headed door opening, a door frame with a pointed arch drawn in a gentle S-curve, fitted with a riveted wooden door. It is a small, quietly specific piece of architecture, the kind that tends to go unrecorded until it, too, disappears.