It had been a modest but composed early nineteenth-century structure, two storeys over a basement, with a three-bay entrance front to the east and a matching view front to the south. A round-headed doorway sat to the right of the entrance façade, and the window openings were dressed in brick, a detail that gave the building a quiet architectural formality common to the period's provincial gentry houses.

What makes the site quietly layered is the ground on which it sat. The linear single-storey farm buildings running to the north of the house are believed locally to occupy the site of Marshalstown Castle, an earlier fortification that preceded the house by centuries. That kind of continuity, where a later domestic building and its working farmyard settle onto the footprint of a much older defended structure, is not unusual in rural Ireland, but it rarely survives long enough to be noticed. Here, the house is gone and the farm range remains, carrying the older history almost by accident.