It is catalogued as a house rather than a castle or tower house, which places it in an interesting middle ground: not the vertical, defensible tower that dominates the popular image of late medieval Irish architecture, but something closer to a domestic building, perhaps reflecting the gradual shift towards more settled and less purely martial forms of habitation that accompanied the Plantation era in Connacht and Munster.

Beyond its broad date range and its location in Clare, the specific details of Elmhill's surviving structure remain formally unrecorded in any publicly accessible form at present. What can be said is that County Clare was, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a complex and contested territory. The O'Brien lordship, long dominant in the region, was being negotiated and gradually absorbed into English administrative structures throughout this period, and houses of this era in Clare often reflect that transition, built by families navigating between Gaelic tradition and the new colonial order. Whether Elmhill's house belongs to a Gaelic Irish household, a newly settled English or Old English family, or some arrangement in between, cannot be said without closer documentary research.