Battlements on a police barracks are an unusual touch, suggesting a designer who either anticipated serious trouble or simply wanted to project an imposing authority in a remote part of Kerry.

The building is recorded as the Mulgrave Police Barrack on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, named most likely for Constantine Phipps, the second Earl of Mulgrave, who served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland between 1835 and 1839 and was associated with a reforming approach to policing during a period when the Irish Constabulary was still being consolidated as a force. The structure itself is a solid piece of institutional construction: walls roughly 0.6 metres thick in split random rubble sandstone, originally rendered, with large rectangular window openings nearly 1.8 metres high and 1.7 metres wide, framed in brick. The front elevation runs three bays across, with a central doorway, and the roof was originally hipped, served by two off-centre chimneys whose upper courses are also in brick. Behind the main block, an enclosed yard once held lean-to outbuildings, the domestic and operational infrastructure of a small rural police post.

The ruin sits on the southern side of a road and is now surrounded by pasture. The octagonal corner towers, even in their present state, give the structure an outline quite unlike the plain functional barracks buildings found elsewhere in Ireland, making it a quietly strange survival in this part of the Killarney uplands.