Somewhere in a gentle valley in County Waterford, a roofless masonry shell sits tucked into the corner of a walled garden, its tall windows open to the sky and its local name, the White House, quietly at odds with the grander designation it carries on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1840 and 1951. Those maps record it as a Mansion House in Ruins, which suggests that even by the mid-nineteenth century the building had long since fallen out of use, its decline already old news.

The history of the site is knotted with the upheavals of the seventeenth century. Local tradition, recorded in Ordnance Survey field notes, held that the house belonged to a branch of the Power family, one of the old Hiberno-Norman dynasties of Waterford, who were dispossessed in the 1650s during the Cromwellian settlement that stripped Catholic landowners across Ireland. Yet the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a systematic record of landholding compiled in the aftermath of that settlement, names a James White of Waterford City as the owner of the land in 1640, before the dispossessions took effect. Whether the Powers held it before White, or whether the local memory conflated different periods of ownership, is not clear. The structure itself is probably eighteenth century in date, meaning the ruins standing today may post-date both the Powers and James White entirely, raised by whoever held the land after the dust of the 1650s had settled. The building is all masonry, with no brick, its walls still standing to between 2.8 and 3 metres in places, and it occupies the north-west corner of a rectangular walled garden measuring roughly 50 metres by 33 metres internally. At least two tall windows survive in the north wall and one in the west. A roadway once ran northward from the house to Kilbride church, about 130 metres away, though no trace of that approach now remains.