What survives, or rather what survived until recently, was a long low two-storey structure over a basement, ten bays wide across its eastern front, with extensions reaching back on either side to partially enclose a courtyard. By around 1988 the main house had been reduced to a pile of rubble, leaving behind a scatter of ruined stone farm buildings, a walled garden now thick with conifer planting, and two entrance lodges, one of which retains ornate windows that hint at the ambition the original complex once projected.

The house was the seat of the Colthurst family, described by the architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones in 1978 as a Georgian house with long elevations. The Colthursts vacated Ardrum in the mid-nineteenth century when they relocated to Blarney Castle Demesne, leaving the building to begin its long decline. There is a particular layering of abandonment here worth noting: the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map already marks a structure roughly a kilometre to the west-northwest as "Ardrum Ho. (in ruins)", suggesting this was an earlier house on the same estate that had fallen derelict before the Georgian replacement was even occupied at full life. One family, two ruined houses, and a trajectory that ends in forestry and rubble.

The surviving lodges and the outline of the farmyard complex, with its ranges of one- and two-storey stone buildings and adjacent residential houses, give some sense of the estate's original scale. The brick-lined walled garden to the south, a feature that would once have supplied the household, is now indistinguishable from the surrounding plantation to any casual observer passing through.