Bence-Jones described the building in 1988 as a rambling house of several periods and great character, which is a polite way of saying that its layers of construction have never quite been resolved into a single coherent whole. That quality of accumulated time, walls from one era quietly absorbed into the fabric of another, is precisely what makes the place worth knowing about.

The clearest early record of the house as it once stood comes from a 1761 estate map of the Armstrong lands at Mealiff, drawn by Paul Higgins and James Madden. That map shows a substantial two-storey, five-bay house with a central pediment and a chimney stack at each end, the kind of formal Georgian composition that was standard ambition for a prosperous landed estate in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland. The house depicted is considered no earlier than the eighteenth century in origin, and that structure was subsequently incorporated into the present Moyaliff House as the building grew and changed across the following century. The Butler connection, if the walls Bence-Jones mentions are genuine survivals, would push the site's history considerably further back, the Butlers being one of the great medieval Anglo-Norman dynasties of Munster and Leinster, with a long presence across Tipperary in particular. Whether those older walls are visible or distinguishable from the later fabric is not recorded.