That is because it was not. The building opened on the 20th of March, 1847, as a fever hospital, at the precise moment when the Great Famine was pushing the country towards its worst year of death and displacement. Whatever the view south over the town below, the building would have been a place of dread for those brought to it.

The structure follows a practical institutional form: five bays across the front with a central doorway, gable ends, a slate roof, and a single-storey extension to the rear. Ordnance Survey maps from 1846 and 1895 show it as a T-shaped complex, with two smaller flanking buildings behind the main block, suggesting it was conceived with some capacity in mind from the outset. The chimney on the eastern gable projects slightly from the wall plane, a small irregularity in an otherwise orderly facade. The sash frames that survive on the first floor are a quiet reminder of how little the building's exterior has been altered. It now operates as a private dwelling, which means a building that processed suffering on an extraordinary scale during the Famine years has been absorbed, without particular ceremony, into the ordinary landscape of rural Kerry.