It is the kind of building that could easily be passed without a second glance, a three-bay, single-storey structure with rendered walls, a pitched slate roof, and a timber battened half-door, precisely the sort of modest rural dwelling that the Kilmallock Poor Law Union was producing by the hundred in the years following the 1883 Labourers (Ireland) Act. That legislation was introduced to address the chronic shortage of decent housing for agricultural labourers, and the cottages it produced were functional rather than distinguished. This one, built around 1885, became the childhood home of Eamon de Valera, who would go on to serve as both Taoiseach and President of Ireland.

De Valera was born in New York in 1882 and came to Knockmore as a young child to be raised by his maternal grandmother and uncle. The cottage is recorded as National Monument No. 576 and is also listed in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage under registration number 21903913. Its construction details are carefully documented: cast-iron rainwater goods, two-over-two pane timber sliding sash windows, concrete sills, and limestone cobbles to the east of the building. A single-bay outbuilding sits to the south, and the site is enclosed by rubble limestone walls with a single-leaf cast-iron gate. The inventory description reads like a quiet inventory of ordinary rural life in late nineteenth-century Ireland, which is precisely what makes it worth attention.

The cottage sits in the Knockmore area south of Bruree in County Limerick, a locality associated with de Valera's early years and commemorated elsewhere in the village through the Bruree Heritage Centre. The building retains much of its original fabric, and a visitor looking closely will notice the small timber gablet added over the front door in more recent times, a minor alteration that sits slightly awkwardly against the otherwise period character of the structure. The limestone cobbles to the east and the rubble stone boundary walls give a sense of how modest rural holdings in Limerick were arranged in the 1880s, enclosed and practical rather than ornamental.