It sits as the southernmost building in a range of later farm outbuildings, and the Ordnance Survey maps it without flagging it as an antiquity at all. Yet the walls at ground and first-floor level are unusually thick, up to 1.54 metres at the south gable, and the building retains a barrel vault, a form of curved stone ceiling common in late medieval Irish structures, over its loft level, with wicker-centring still visible. Wicker-centring refers to the woven rods used as temporary support while a vault's mortar set; its survival here is relatively rare. The original entrance is gone, replaced by a later doorway broken through the south gable, though a pointed doorway in the north end of the west wall still leads into a small stair lobby with a blocked loop window and a hanging-eye for a door still visible in the embrasure.

The building's history is entangled with that of the wider Kilrush estate. According to William Carrigan, writing in 1905, the castle here was held by the Shortall family until the Cromwellian Land Settlement of the 1650s to 1660s, when it passed to the St. Georges. That family occupied the castle and an adjoining house until they constructed the present Kilrush House around 1818. The structure under discussion stands roughly 110 metres east-northeast of a tower house and about 125 metres south-southeast of a medieval church, suggesting it formed part of a dense cluster of late medieval occupation on this stretch of the valley floor. The lower two storeys, built of roughly coursed limestone rubble with well-bonded masonry, are dated to the 15th or 16th century. Above the vault, however, the masonry changes in character, and a projecting flat-stone string course at approximately 5.5 metres above ground level marks the boundary between the medieval fabric and what appears to be an 18th-century addition, possibly as late as the 17th century. The upper storey is now inaccessible and heavily overgrown with scrub, while ivy covers the north gable and the internal face of the south gable.

The interior details that survive give a sense of a building that was once carefully fitted out for occupation or storage rather than purely defensive use. Two small wall cupboards remain at ground-floor level, one in the north gable and one in the east wall. The loft above was reached by a wooden stair or ladder through the floor, and the mural stair in the north wall, which would have connected levels within the wall thickness itself, is now blocked. Several windows have been modified or blocked at various points, including an unusual hourglass-splayed embrasure in the east wall that splays both inward and outward, a form that allowed light in while restricting external visibility.