The surviving fragment, built from limestone rubble with a cut-stone plinth running along its base, gives little immediate sense of the substantial double-pile residence that once stood here, a two-storey house with six chimney stacks, dormer attic windows, and floor-to-ceiling glazing at ground and first-floor level. A 1893 account noted one particular curiosity: the two ends of the house carried no windows at less than thirty feet from the ground, an architectural quirk that still puzzles. Partially demolished in 1946, what is left preserves just enough to read the plan, including the spine wall that divided the interior into two rooms and the ghost of a blocked-up window at first-floor level.

The story of the house stretches back to the early seventeenth century and the Plantation of Longford, the organised settlement of English and Scottish landowners on confiscated Irish land. Around 1620, Thomas Clarke, who had received a grant of five hundred acres, was recorded by the Plantation Commissioners as having begun 'a good stone house which is two stories high and will finish it shortly, having all the materials ready for it in place.' By 1642 the property belonged to Sir Silvester Browne, and it was here that his wife, Dame Mary Browne, gave testimony about a tense incident during the 1641 rebellion, when men came to the gate of Formoyle demanding entry and, refused, climbed over the surrounding ditch into the base court. The house changed hands again, and by 1682 Nicholas Dowdall described it as the seat of Sir John Parker, whose father, the Archbishop of Dublin, had built a substantial house with stables, a pleasure garden, and orchards. By 1681 it had acquired a more relaxed character, functioning as a country retreat for hunting deer and, as one account put it, 'eating it.' A deer park and the remains of associated gardens still adjoin the site, and a possible enclosure to the north-west may have been reused as a bawn, a walled or ditched courtyard typical of Plantation-era settlements in Ireland.

The ruins sit on a rise visible from the surrounding farmland, and the surviving south-west gable, measuring just over eleven metres in external length and more than two metres thick, is substantial enough to read clearly in the landscape. The blocked windows and remnant fireplaces are visible within the standing wall, and the outhouse built against the interior of the north-west room adds another layer to the long sequence of use and adaptation the site has seen across three centuries.