Embedded in the south wall of a small one-storey building near Kilcavan is stonework that once formed part of a substantial 16th or 17th-century house, probably of one storey with an attic above. The original south wall, still standing to a thickness of 0.7 metres, gives some sense of the solidity of what was once a considerably larger building, with external dimensions running almost nineteen metres east to west and just over eight metres north to south. On the outer face of an adjacent tower house, the flashing, meaning the weatherproofing material at the junction where a roof once met the wall, remains visible, marking where that earlier building stood against the tower.

The Fitzhenrys were the dominant landowners in Kilcavan from at least the mid-13th century, and it is within that long territorial context that this layered complex of tower house and attached domestic building makes most sense. Tower houses were the fortified residential towers common across late medieval Ireland, and the larger house attached to this one would have represented the more comfortable domestic accommodation associated with such a stronghold. Two details in the surviving fabric hint at the building's age and character. On the exterior of the south wall, a square hood moulding frames one of the windows; this type of decorative stone surround, projecting slightly to deflect rainwater, was a relatively common feature of late medieval and early modern vernacular architecture in Ireland. Inside, what the exterior presents as a window opening is in fact a blocked pointed doorway, a quiet architectural deception in which a later use has quietly obscured an earlier one. The parish church at Kilcavan lies roughly 400 metres to the southeast, situating this complex within what was once a coherent local centre of landholding and religious life.