By then the two-storey limestone building had already been standing empty long enough for its hipped roof to partially collapse, but the fabric beneath remained legible: elliptical-arched doorway, delicately carved cut-limestone surround, sidelights framing the entrance, a round-headed stairway window on the south-west elevation. These were not the fittings of a modest farmhouse. Whoever built this place around 1790 was making a considered architectural statement, even in a part of Cork that had no shortage of such statements.

The house was built by the Purcells, according to the local historian James Grove White, writing in the early twentieth century. The construction is rendered random-rubble limestone with brick detailing, a combination that gives the building its slightly layered character even in ruin, the brick cornices and brick-arched window openings reading as a distinct register against the rougher stonework beneath. To the north-west of the main house, a two-storey farm building survives, its archway bearing a keystone carved with a coat of arms. Beyond that lies a brick-lined walled garden, and in the north wall of the garden the remains of a two-storey stone tower. Grove White also recorded a story attached to the garden's south-west corner: Sir Alexander Mac Donnell was said to have been buried there, before being reinterred at Clonmeen graveyard nearby. The details of why he came to be buried in a garden corner in the first place, and when the reinterment took place, are not recorded, but the tradition itself points to the kind of layered, sometimes irregular history that tends to gather around a property over two centuries.

The main house is gone, demolished rather than fallen, which gives the site an abrupt quality that purely natural decay does not. What remains, the farm building, the walled garden, the tower fragment, the carved keystone, amount to a partial outline of a once-coherent demesne, each element surviving by a different margin.