The name sounds grander than it is. A fish palace was an industrial facility for processing pilchards, the oily schooling fish that once arrived in enormous seasonal shoals along the south-west coast of Ireland and Britain. The pressing of oil from the fish was a serious commercial enterprise, and the architecture that supported it was correspondingly robust.

What survives at Ardgroom Inward is dominated by a central press beam support wall, 13.7 metres long and 3.65 metres high, a substantial piece of masonry by any measure. Along its north and south elevations are eighteen lintelled niches, each small and precisely formed, sitting just above ground level. Higher up, eight beam holes perforate the wall, positioned to receive the horizontal timbers of the presses that would have squeezed oil from stacked layers of fish and matting. The surrounding structures to the north, east, and south have largely collapsed, with only a low wall remaining to the west, but the press wall itself retains enough detail to make the industrial logic of the place legible. The site was noted by O'Shea and Crowley in 1972, placing it within a broader effort to document what had by then become a largely forgotten industry along the Cork and Kerry coastlines.