The main house was demolished in 1981, leaving this ornate little structure as the sole physical trace of what was once a substantial country estate. That a gate lodge should outlast the house it was built to announce is quietly ironic, and the hexagonal form makes the survival all the more curious. Gate lodges were typically modest, functional buildings, but whoever commissioned this one had something more elaborate in mind.

Photographic evidence recorded before the demolition shows the house as a two-storey structure with a hipped roof clad in weather-slating, a method of covering walls or roofs with overlapping slates to shed rain, giving the building a distinctive texture. The entrance front ran to six bays, with a central round-headed door opening framed by a classical surround and a broken pediment, a decorative triangular gable split at its apex, common in Georgian architecture as a way of adding formality without heaviness. The overall appearance was of late eighteenth-century design, placing its construction somewhere in the period when such houses were going up across Cork and the wider south of Ireland in considerable numbers.

The gate lodge remains to the south of the former entrance, largely consumed by vegetation. The cut-stone construction and the unusual hexagonal plan suggest it was built with some care and expense, though its current state makes a close reading of the architecture difficult. For anyone passing through Barnahely, the lodge is the last legible sign that a household of some ambition once stood here.