No plan was ever published, no illustration survives, and the structure itself was burnt in 1690 and subsequently demolished, leaving later generations to piece together its scale and character from a handful of written descriptions and the ghost of a landscape.

The house was built by Roger Boyle, Lord Orrery and President of Munster, who laid the foundation stone on 29th May 1661. It took nearly two decades to complete, at a reported cost of around £20,000, and was considered among the greatest houses of its period in Ireland. One eighteenth-century account describes its noble garden and fine park; another suggests the house occupied one side of a walled courtyard large enough to be defended with sixteen guns. That combination of domestic grandeur and military practicality was not unusual in late seventeenth-century Ireland, where the boundary between a country house and a defensible compound was often deliberately blurred. The house was burnt in 1690, and what remained was pulled down.

What a visitor finds today is, in effect, an absence with edges. Near Moatville House, a roughly square field of about 120 metres a side is enclosed by an ivy-clad stone wall standing close to three metres high and nearly two-thirds of a metre thick. High enclosing walls of this kind, forming a courtyard around a central house, are characteristic of the period, and this field is thought to be the likely site of the building itself. A ruined opening in the north-eastern wall may once have been a gateway into the gardens, and it aligns with the remains of four fish ponds in the adjoining field. Earthen field boundaries visible on nineteenth-century maps once extended in parallel lines to the south-west as far as the main street of Charleville and to the north-east toward the Limerick border road; much of the north-eastern line survives as low field fences. Immediately to the south-east, a Golden Vale Co-operative industrial plant now occupies part of what was once the demesne.