The house is not ruined in any dramatic sense; it is simply abandoned, which in some ways is stranger. The bay windows on either side of the entrance front, the added porch sheltering a segmental-headed doorway, the plate glass sash windows on the first floor: these are details that speak of a household that was, at some point, keeping pace with fashion and spending accordingly.

The structure at Gortnagraiga appears to have been built in the mid-nineteenth century, then updated and embellished sometime later in the same century, a pattern common to Irish rural gentry houses whose owners periodically modernised the facade without altering the underlying form. The T-shape, visible in the two-storey gabled projection to the rear, gave the house more room than its modest three-bay entrance front might suggest, and a lean-to addition to the southwest indicates further incremental expansion over time. Two-storey farm buildings survive behind the main house, evidence that this was a working agricultural holding as well as a residence. At the entrance, a one-storey lodge, also abandoned, retains its pointed windows and hipped roof, the kind of small gate lodge that signals a household with enough pretension to mark its boundary formally, if not extravagantly.