The country house at Croaghnacree in north Cork is a ruin now, but its fabric tells a layered story. The entrance front and side elevations are built of brick set on a coursed ashlar plinth, while the rear is random-rubble limestone with brick detail; two quite different constructional approaches meeting in the same building. An eleven-bay entrance front faces north-east, with a round-headed door flanked by sidelights and sash windows retaining their moulded limestone sills. The overall plan is L-shaped, the result of a lean-to and a two-storey rear addition that were already in place by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842.

The house was built in 1709 by a Reverend Sayers, and for more than two centuries it served as a substantial rural residence with a cobbled yard, outbuildings, and a walled garden to the south. At some point before the mid-twentieth century it carried a thatched roof, visible in a photograph taken between 1905 and 1925. By 1952 it had been vacated and began to fall into disrepair. A renovation effort followed, during which the original thatch was replaced with a slate roof with deeply projecting eaves and new windows were inserted, but the work was never finished; the house caught fire before the renovations were completed and was subsequently abandoned again. A further attempt at renovation was made in 1998, though the building remains a ruin today, its brick and limestone fabric slowly returning to the north Cork landscape it has occupied for more than three hundred years.