What makes the ruin worth attention is not just its dramatic position but the detail preserved inside: a fireplace over two metres wide set into a crossing wall, flanked by small round-headed niches, and beside it a brick-domed bread oven, complete with flue, measuring roughly 83 centimetres by a metre. Domestic archaeology at this level of survival is relatively uncommon, and the oven in particular gives a sense of a working household rather than simply a collapsed façade.

The house was L-shaped in plan, with its long axis running north-west to south-east and a projection at the south-east end of the north-east side, as recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842. The surviving south-west wall, five bays wide with a central round-headed stairway window, still carries fragmentary weatherslating, a practical finish in which slates were applied vertically to an exterior wall surface to shed rain. The origins of the building appear to reach back to the mid-seventeenth century at least; the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, a large-scale mapping project carried out under William Petty to record land ownership following the Cromwellian conquest, marks a house in this vicinity. To the north-north-west of the main ruin, a rectangular farm building measuring nearly twenty-four metres in length retains large windows in its gable ends, suggesting it served a purpose requiring light, perhaps as a barn or store, rather than purely as shelter for animals.