Someone here in the early nineteenth century wanted to record both a name and a Latin title for what was being built, or perhaps rebuilt, on this cliff edge in north Cork. The house is gone as a functioning structure, its roof removed at some point after the 1960s, and it now sits overgrown among mature trees, the Blackwater visible to the south below.

What makes the ruin architecturally interesting is the layering of two very different periods within a single set of walls. The early nineteenth-century castellated house, noted by Bence Jones in 1978, was built to incorporate an older tower house on its western side. A tower house is a compact fortified residence, common across Ireland from the medieval period, and here it was not demolished but remodelled, with large transomed and mullioned windows inserted and an embattled parapet added to bring it into line with the newer Gothic Revival aesthetic. The entrance front facing north runs to five bays, with a hexagonal embattled turret at roughly its centre, the two bays to the west of the turret rising to three storeys and stepping slightly forward to absorb the older structure. On the ground floor of this section, a recessed ogee-headed door, its arch shaped in a gentle S-curve typical of Gothic Revival detailing, is reached by a short flight of steps. The double ogee-headed window openings throughout the house, with their recessed spandrels and hood mouldings, give the whole facade a consistency that half-conceals how much older its western portion actually is. The rear elevation carried a projecting stair tower, and it is here that the Holmes plaque survives, an oddly formal piece of self-commemoration on a building that no longer has a roof.