Machicolations are the projecting parapets on genuine medieval fortifications, with floor openings through which defenders could drop stones or boiling liquid on attackers below. Here, they are purely decorative, part of the theatrical grammar of Gothic revival architecture, which borrowed the visual vocabulary of the Middle Ages and applied it to the gentlemen's residences of the early nineteenth century. The result, before fire took it, would have looked something like a castle without ever having needed to function as one.

The ruin sits built into a north-east-facing slope above the Bandon river in County Cork, its long axis running roughly north-west to south-east. The plan is irregular, with a circular tower at the southern corner and a polygonal tower at the northern one, the whole thing capped with an embattled parapet and corner turrets. It is two storeys over a basement. Somewhere to the west, also on the estate, stands a separate ornamental tower, the kind of folly that would have completed the composed landscape a Gothic revival property was expected to provide. The house was burnt in 1920, during the period of intense violence and destruction that accompanied the War of Independence and its aftermath, when a significant number of Anglo-Irish country houses across Cork and the surrounding counties were put to the torch. The walls that remain are consequently shell rather than structure, the interior long since open to weather and growth.