When the thatch was stripped in recent decades, the replacement roofing sealed in the sod under-thatch beneath it, preserving physical evidence that this was once a thatched building. The owner subsequently uncovered those sods and confirmed what architectural historians had long suspected: that the house, built around 1640, retains the bones of its original roof construction under the functional modern covering. That accidental preservation makes it unusual in a country where so many vernacular structures of this age have been either demolished or so heavily altered that their origins are barely legible.

The house sits in the Kilcomin area of Offaly and is known locally as Ballytoran House. It was first brought to wider attention by the architectural historian Maurice Craig in 1973, who described it at the time as an eighteenth-century farmhouse, a cautious dating that later research revised firmly back to the early seventeenth century. Writing in 2004, O'Reilly identified it as the most intact early building in the county with surviving evidence of its thatched roof. Built as a miller's house, the structure is four bays wide and two storeys tall, with a possibly blocked fifth bay and a ruined return to the rear that still carries the remains of a hearth. The architectural details place it squarely in its period: thick walls, a steeply pitched roof, small window openings, and chimneystacks set diagonally on the gable tops, a feature characteristic of Irish buildings from the early 1600s. A single pile form, meaning the house is just one room deep, was standard for domestic buildings of this scale and date. Inside, a wide central staircase survives. By the time the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map was made, the house was depicted as part of a T-plan complex, with a range of buildings to the north-east annotated as an Old Distillery, suggesting the site had grown into something more than a simple miller's residence over the intervening two centuries. The mill and outbuildings to the north and east of the house still form a related group of structures on the site today.