The house itself, a two-storey Gothic Revival composition with stepped gables, battlements, mullioned windows, and a Tudor-Revival staircase in the hall, was largely demolished by the Land Commission, the state body that, through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, acquired and redistributed landlord estates across Ireland. The demolition left the farm buildings standing and the house absent, which gives the site its quietly disorienting quality: the functional outbuildings survive while the architecture that made the place legible as a gentry residence is gone.

The history behind the house runs considerably deeper than its Victorian Gothic exterior suggested. Writing in 1911, Pike noted that it was said to be three hundred years old and had been added to over time, which would place its origins somewhere around the early seventeenth century. That tallies with a grant recorded by Grove White, in which the castle and lands of Ballyclohee were included in a grant to Arthur Hyde in 1588. The Hyde family were a significant presence in north Cork, and the site appears to have accumulated layers of building across the centuries before receiving its Gothic-fronted makeover, with the seven-bay facade, buttresses, and battlements that the architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones described in 1978. By then, of course, the house was already gone, and Bence-Jones was working from earlier accounts and records rather than the building itself.