It is now blocked by the steps that lead up to the main entrance, but its presence quietly unsettles any straightforward reading of the building. A glebe house, for those unfamiliar with the term, was the official residence attached to a Church of Ireland parish living, typically built to a respectable but modest standard. This one is neither straightforward nor modest in its history.

The structure probably began life in the late seventeenth or very early eighteenth century, and several features point stubbornly to that earlier period: walls that are unusually thick, wide chimneystacks on the gables, a shallow plan, and the irregular spacing of windows forced by the mass of the interior walls. In 1796, however, the architect Richard Morrison was commissioned by the Reverend Francis Benson to carry out an extensive remodelling. Morrison, who would later become one of the most prominent country-house architects in Ireland, reworked the building along neo-Palladian lines, a style characterised by symmetry, classical proportion, and tall refined windows with small panes. It is thought that during this remodelling the main entrance was lifted from ground level to the first floor, which had the effect of turning the original ground storey into a half-basement. This intervention explains one of the building's more quietly peculiar features: the windows are taller than the front door, a reversal of the usual hierarchy. The cantilevered elliptical timber staircase inside, which curves upward without visible support from below, also dates to this 1796 campaign and remains the interior's most arresting element. Twentieth-century additions to the north and south have been absorbed into the fabric over time, but the layered tension between the defensive, thick-walled early house and its later neoclassical dressing is still legible in the building's proportions and details.