It is all that survives above ground of Dunkerron Court, a three-storey manor house built on the shores of Kenmare Bay in the late sixteenth century. The juxtaposition is quietly absurd, and yet the wall itself rewards close attention: cut limestone corbels still project from the masonry at first-floor level, a 2.4-metre fireplace retains its chamfered jamb and joggled mantel, and a well-preserved chimney of dressed stone tops the surviving western gable. The eastern gable has largely fallen.

The manor house is reputed to have been built by Owen O'Sullivan and his second wife, Sily MacCarthy Riabhach, sometime after 1580, the year Owen was inaugurated as O'Sullivan More, the title given to the chief of that powerful Kerry dynasty. In 1588 he was described in state papers as 'lord of a great country, the Earl's [of Clancarr] seneschal and marshal,' a phrase that captures something of the regional authority the O'Sullivans exercised from this place. The adjoining tower house, Dunkerron Castle, known in Irish as Dún Ciaráin, served as their principal residence and was still described in 1632, during the tenure of Donal O'Sullivan More, as 'a strong and defensible building.' That description did not protect it. In 1656, following the upheavals of the Cromwellian period, the entire property was confiscated. It passed to Sir William Petty, the surveyor and economist who acquired vast tracts of Munster land in the same era, and subsequent O'Sullivan More petitions for its return came to nothing.

What remains of the manor house is essentially a 13.5-metre section of the south-east wall, built from roughly coursed rubble set in a heavy gravel mortar. The ground floor is choked with stone collapse, but three narrow window openings survive at that level, each set in a lintelled embrasure with widely splayed inner reveals and cut limestone sills. On the first floor, the large fireplace and its corbelled mantel are the most legible features, giving some sense of how substantial the interior once was. The site sits within the grounds of Dunkerron House, approximately three kilometres west of Kenmare, overlooking Kenmare Bay to the south and the Beara Peninsula beyond.