It is, in fact, the fourth, and the ghosts of its predecessors are still out there in the landscape, scattered across roughly a kilometre and a half of parkland, some reduced to earthworks, one to overgrown stable ruins.

The present mansion was built between 1839 and 1843 for Colonel the Right Honourable H. A. Herbert, MP, to designs by the Scottish architect William Burn. It is a substantial cut-stone exercise in the Elizabethan Revival style, a Victorian architectural fashion that looked back to the grand country houses of Tudor and Jacobean England, borrowing their stepped gables, pointed finials, mullioned windows, and tall decorative chimneys. Oriels, which are projecting bay windows cantilevered from an upper storey, punctuate the facade at intervals, and a porte-cochere, a covered carriage entrance built into the front of the house, was added around 1870. A walled garden sits immediately to the east. The three earlier houses on the demesne were not all swept away at once. The first dates to the early eighteenth century and stood about a kilometre to the west; the second was built around 1770 and its approximate location lies some 450 metres to the north, its associated stable yard now a tangle of overgrown ruins. The third, known as Torc Cottage, sits about a kilometre and a half to the south-southwest. A two-storey house of early nineteenth-century appearance, known as Arthur Vincent House and thought to have served as the estate manager's residence, survives around 500 metres to the northwest of the main house.

The wider demesne retains a working landscape of gate lodges, estate cottages, boathouses, quays, and bridges, many of them still identifiable on the ground. Visitors who move beyond the main house and its formal approaches will find that Muckross rewards a slower, more lateral exploration, with the ruins and residual structures of four distinct phases of occupation quietly coexisting across the one estate.