The fabric of the house, an L-plan structure with a projecting chimney on its north gable, includes cut quoins at the north-west angle, one of which bears pock-tooling within a plain margin, a detail suggesting the stone was salvaged from an earlier structure and reused. Brick features heavily in the window surrounds and towards the top of the chimney, and the roof sits at a notably shallow pitch with brick coping, details that point to an eighteenth-century build or substantial rebuild, even as the underlying material may tell a different story.

The earlier story begins in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a mid-seventeenth-century inventory compiled by English administrators to record landownership across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest. That survey notes a thatched house with chimneys in the townland then recorded as Burgesse, which in 1640 had been the property of Hugh MaCragh of Burgesse, listed among the Irish Papists, the shorthand the survey used to identify Catholic landowners. The designation was not merely religious; it carried legal and political weight in a period when Catholic landownership was under severe pressure. The thatched house with chimneys recorded then has been tentatively identified as the predecessor to the present building, which would mean the current structure grew up around or on top of what Hugh MaCragh once owned. The finely cut and decorated sandstone gate piers at the entrance, one of which now lies dismantled, hint at a property that was once presented with some formality, whatever its subsequent history.