The entrance front still carries the remains of Ionic columns, the classical order associated with grace and proportion, framing a central doorway with a concave stone surround and a semicircular fanlight above. Steps once rose to that door. On the northwest elevation, a tall round-headed window that would have lit a staircase sits above a small oval one, a pairing that suggests the interior was designed with some care for light and sequence. The rear and northwest elevations are weatherslated, a practical finish in which overlapping slates clad the wall face against driving rain, common in Cork and Kerry where westerly weather is persistent. The hipped roof, with its central valley between two slopes meeting in a shallow gutter, and two off-centre chimneys, completes a structure that was once, by the standards of its rural setting, a considered piece of architecture.

The house dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a period when the landscape of southern Ireland was being steadily reorganised around the residences of landowning families, from substantial mansions down to the kind of modest but aspirational two-storey house over a sunken basement that this appears to have been. The basement, set below ground level, would typically have housed the working functions of the household. The main block runs four bays deep, with a three-bay entrance front to the northeast. Associated farm buildings lie nearby, and a walled garden to the northwest, the latter a feature that required real investment and signals that whoever occupied the place intended to stay and to produce. That ensemble, house, outbuildings, and enclosed garden, is the standard grammar of a minor rural seat of the era, and its survival as a ruin in Ballymartle preserves a faint but legible outline of that world.