At Ballywilliam in County Cork, a two-storey early nineteenth-century house looks south over the Bandon River, its entrance front presenting three bays to the east, with an Ionic-columned doorcase, a semi-circular fanlight, and a short flight of steps leading up to the threshold. The basement is buried from view, invisible at ground level, giving the building an oddly compressed appearance from the outside. On the north elevation, a date stone cut with the initials "W.V.B." and the year 1815 marks the stairway window, a modest but durable record of whoever commissioned the place.

The river front to the south is the more ambitious elevation, stretching across five bays and extending outward through curved curtain walls, the kind of sweeping compositional gesture that was fashionable in Regency-era Irish country house design. Those curtain walls connect the main block to two-bay, two-storey wings on either side. The wings are now in ruins. The main roof is hipped with a central valley, a practical arrangement for a building of this width, and farm buildings survive to the north, a reminder that the house was always at the centre of a working agricultural holding rather than a purely ornamental estate. The initials on the 1815 date stone have not been publicly identified, which leaves the original owner a figure of minor but genuine mystery.