What gives the site its quiet strangeness is not the ruin alone but its relationship with the clapper bridge immediately to its south-east, a clapper being a simple ancient bridge type made from flat stone slabs laid across upright supports. The north-west pier of that bridge butts directly against the east corner of the house, a physical detail that implies the two were conceived, or at least used, in close connection with one another.

The house dates to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century and was originally a single-storey structure. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842 it was recorded simply as "Water Ho.", and sixty years later the 1902 revision noted it as already in ruins, meaning whatever domestic life it once held had ended well before living memory. The longer south-west arm of the L contained a large fireplace with a wooden lintel, which divided that section into two rooms; set within the fireplace is a brick-lined oven measuring roughly 0.88 metres by 1.22 metres, a domestic detail that anchors the place firmly in everyday rural life rather than anything grand. Corner fireplaces survive in the south corner of the L and possibly in the north corner of the north-west arm as well. Most of the inner wall faces have collapsed, though window and door openings, known in survey terminology as opes, remain visible in both the south-east and south-west external walls. Across the river to the south-east stands Springfield House, a separate property on the opposite bank, a reminder that this stretch of the Awbeg was once a more populated and purposeful landscape than its current overgrown silence suggests.