Locally known as Carey's Castle, this small ruined house along the Glenary River in County Waterford is precisely the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers. It has a semi-circular tower that looks like it belongs to a medieval keep, yet it contains no staircase. It has battlements of a sort, crenellations cut into the parapet of the northern block, but they are false, purely decorative. A corbelled bartizan, the small turret that projects from a corner of a wall, juts from the north-east angle of the southern block, yet the same building has no fireplaces. For a structure that performs all the outward gestures of a fortified dwelling, it seems to have been designed with a studied indifference to either defence or warmth.

The name carries echoes older than the building itself. The glen takes its name from a church connected to the Cistercian monastery of Inislounaght, near Clonmel in County Tipperary, one of the more important medieval monastic houses in Munster. When the monasteries were suppressed in the sixteenth century, the land in the Glenary valley was granted to a man named Edward Gough, and the Gough family retained a presence there into the 1650s. By the nineteenth century ownership had passed to the Carey family, who are thought to have built what now stands. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 marks it as Glenabbey House, confirming that the building was well established by that point, even if its architectural ambitions outran its scale.

What survives today is two small blocks, north and south, separated by a gateway that opens into a walled garden to the east. The southern block, three storeys high, once had additional rooms extending further south with bay windows overlooking the river, though those structures are gone. The only way between the two main blocks was a narrow first-floor passage running above the gateway arch below, an arrangement that gives the whole composition a compressed, slightly theatrical quality, as though the Careys wanted the appearance of a castle without the inconvenience of building one.