The clusters of five diagonally set chimneys that crown each gable still stand, the mullioned windows of the upper floors retain their shape, and patches of interior plasterwork remain on walls that have been open to the sky for generations. It is a building that communicates its original intention with unusual clarity for something roofless and emptied out, which is partly what makes it so quietly disorienting to stand beside.

Built around 1630, probably by the Burke family, the structure sits on a slight rise above the eastern bank of a small stream, at what was likely a crossing point, and may itself occupy ground where an earlier castle once stood. It is classified as a semi-fortified house, a building type that emerged in early seventeenth-century Ireland as the strict military logic of the tower house began to soften into something more domestic, though not entirely. The ground-floor windows at Glinsk are each set into deep embrasures flanked by musket loops, and three machicolations, openings in the parapet through which objects or liquids could be dropped on those below, project from the corners and above the north doorway. That north doorway retains a perforation in its jamb consistent with the fitting of a yett, an iron gate of the kind common in Scottish and Irish defended buildings of the period. The main entrance, however, was at first-floor level in the south wall, a deliberate raising of the threshold that added another layer of difficulty for any unwanted caller. The building once sat within a bawn, a walled enclosure typically used to protect livestock and provide a defensive perimeter; of that enclosure, a section of the west wall and the low foundations of a circular corner turret are all that remain.

The roof, when it existed, was an unusual double arrangement of two parallel gabled ridges running north to south, connected by a cross ridge. None of the internal floors or stairs survive, though traces in the plasterwork suggest the staircase ran through the centre of the building. The whole structure measures nineteen metres in length and just over ten and a half metres wide across three storeys above a basement, compact proportions that feel more apparent inside the shell than from without. It is a National Monument, and the ground around it is managed accordingly.