Corbally House began its life as a presbytery, a residence for a Catholic priest, and its layout still speaks to that origin. The building is U-shaped in plan, with a five-bay front elevation facing roughly east-north-east, a central doorway topped by a rectangular overlight, and long window openings fitted with sash frames and glazing bars. The hipped roof carries two off-centre chimneys along the front and one on each of the rear wings. Behind the house there is a yard and a range of outhouses to the south, the kind of functional arrangement that suited a working clerical household rather than a purely domestic one.

The house is believed to have been built around 1841 by a Father Dunne, placing its construction at a particularly loaded moment in Irish history. The early 1840s came just before the catastrophic famines of the mid-decade, at a time when Catholic institutional building was still finding its footing after generations of legal restriction under the Penal Laws. A priest commissioning or overseeing the construction of a purpose-built residence in rural Kerry at this point was participating in a quiet but significant assertion of permanence and community rootedness. The sash windows and regular five-bay symmetry give the building something of the composed, orderly character associated with Georgian domestic architecture, applied here to a religious rather than a gentry purpose. The house is still occupied today, which means it has survived not just as a fabric record but as a living building across nearly two centuries.