Locally known as the Southwell Gift Houses, the buildings sit in an enclosed arrangement: two flanking rows of paired single-storey dwellings with dormer attics, facing inward across a courtyard and separated from the street by a random-rubble wall punctuated by carved ashlar gate piers, each one topped with a stone urn. At the head of the courtyard stands a larger two-storey house, the former Steward's House, with a decorated brick-fronted porch carrying Doric pilasters, a cornice, engaged pinnacles, and a plaque bearing the Southwell coat of arms set into the gable. The whole ensemble has the composed, slightly formal air of seventeenth-century charitable ambition made architectural.

The complex was erected in 1682 by Sir Robert Southwell, built, as the record has it, "for 8 old people". An almshouse was a form of subsidised housing provided for the poor or elderly, often endowed by a wealthy patron as an act of philanthropic duty, and Southwell's gift fits squarely within that tradition. The individual dwellings are modest in plan, a single room deep with rooms on either side of a central entrance and corridor, but the quality of the detailing suggests that economy was not the only consideration. The windows are timber-framed, quarry-glazed cast-iron, with stone lintels and sills; the dormers have lead-clad barrel-roofs; and inside, squared joists and large chamfered beams survive at first-floor level in the Steward's House. The limestone rubble walls, built from thin, closely packed slabs, were repointed with sand and cement mortar during a refurbishment in 1968, when the buildings were also re-roofed with salvaged slate and the interiors modified. That refurbishment came at the end of a period, 1965 to 1970, during which the houses had been returned to something like their original use. By 2015, however, the condition of the complex had deteriorated to the point where the Church of Ireland, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, put the buildings up for sale. They passed into private ownership, and a conservation and refurbishment project to bring them back into residential use was approved in 2017.