Tower houses were the fortified residences favoured by Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords from the medieval period onward, and the stone's removal and reuse points to the common Georgian habit of treating older ruins as a quarry for curiosities, or occasionally as a form of deliberate historical statement.

The house itself was built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, two storeys over a basement, with the basement largely concealed from the south-facing entrance front. That front was originally a composed, seven-bay arrangement, its centre marked by a fanlighted doorway set within a limestone surround and flanked by sidelights, the kind of restrained elegance that characterised provincial Irish Georgian building. At some point after the original construction, three-bay bowed projections were added to either side of the entrance, softening the flat facade into something more fashionable. A later porch obscured the original doorway further still, so that what was once the focal point of the composition is now largely hidden. Around the rear, the windows sit asymmetrically at basement and ground floor levels, and a round-headed window lights the stairway, a detail that would have allowed a pleasant wash of light onto whatever staircase rises inside. A gabled projection extends to the back of the house as well, suggesting the building grew in stages rather than arriving complete.