Measured at over 25.7 metres long and 11.3 metres wide, the footprint is substantial, yet the structure itself has vanished almost entirely into the earth, leaving only the faint geometry of its walls as a low relief in the turf. Beside it, pressed against the eastern wall of a medieval tower house, a four-storey shell from the eighteenth century still stands, roofless and hollow, giving some sense of the scale the whole complex once achieved.

The story begins with a long, low, narrow two-storey house built in the seventeenth century, constructed directly against the eastern wall of the earlier tower house, which is itself a separate surviving structure on the site. A tower house, for context, is the fortified stone residence common across late medieval Ireland, typically several storeys of thick masonry with modest windows and a defensive character. The seventeenth-century addition represented a shift toward more domestic comfort, even if modest in form. Then, in the eighteenth century, the Donellan family set about transforming the arrangement considerably. According to Mark Bence-Jones, writing in 1978, they effectively absorbed the original castle into the composition, converting it into a flanking wing taller than the seventeenth-century range, and constructed a matching wing at the eastern end to balance it. The result was a symmetrical Georgian remodelling wrapped around an older core, a common enough ambition among Irish landed families of the period, though the physical evidence here is now sparse. Only the eastern wing survives as a standing shell, and the seventeenth-century house itself has dissolved entirely into those grassed-over foundation lines.