It is one of the few surviving fragments of a country house that, by the mid-nineteenth century, had grown into a substantial structure of roughly forty metres by twenty metres, with numerous angles and L-shaped outbuildings trailing to the south. The main house itself is gone, or mostly gone, and the stable block and a porter's lodge about two hundred and fifty metres to the east are what remain to suggest that something considerably grander once occupied this ground.

The story of the house begins with a cottage that the Herbert family, owners of the nearby Muckross House, enlarged around 1800 into a property of real scale. The Herberts were one of the most prominent landowning families in Kerry, and Muckross House itself, on the Muckross Peninsula between the Lower Lake and Muckross Lake, was the centre of their considerable estate. The Torc house, close to the lake's south-eastern edge, appears to have functioned as a secondary residence or estate property within that wider landholding. Ordnance Survey mapping from 1846 records the building at its fullest extent, a complicated footprint with multiple projections. By the time the equivalent survey was carried out in 1895, the map shows a noticeably smaller structure, its long axis now running east to west rather than north to south, which strongly suggests the rear portion of the building had been pulled down in the intervening decades. What caused that reduction, whether economic pressure, disuse, or some more specific event, the maps do not say.