The walls, roughly three-quarters of a metre thick, are faced on the outside with irregular, undressed stone that the antiquarian James Grove White described in the early twentieth century as "very rude natural" stonework, an unusual texture even by the standards of vernacular rural building. Inside, smoothly plastered surfaces and fragments of brick in the east wall suggest a more finished interior, and the remains of a pointed arch doorway give the structure a faintly ecclesiastical air that sits oddly with its domestic purpose.

According to Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, the building was erected as a teahouse by a Mrs Nagle, and was still being used as a summer house as late as 1841, at which point it was thatched. The Nagles were a prominent Catholic family in north Cork, with deep roots in the Awbeg valley, and the name connects this quiet ruin to a wider network of local history. The site sits immediately east of a holy well, and local tradition holds that a church once stood here, which would place the teahouse within a landscape already layered with older devotional use. Whether the pointed arch was a deliberate echo of that ecclesiastical past or simply a fashionable Gothic flourish common to estate follies of the period is not recorded. About four hundred metres to the north stands Rockvale house and its tower, suggesting this stretch of riverbank was once part of a managed demesne where a woodland teahouse would have been a recognisable amenity.