The standing house on the site dates to the nineteenth century, but to its south sits the shell of a second structure, with original brick window surrounds still visible, that was apparently never finished at all.

The site has carried a sense of incompleteness for quite some time. Around 1840, the Ordnance Survey Namebooks, compiled by John O'Donovan and his colleagues during their meticulous townland-by-townland survey of Ireland, recorded "the ruins of an old manor house" at Roskeen. That description suggests the present nineteenth-century house was already standing by then, while the older fabric had already fallen into decay. The ruined structure to the south complicates the picture further. According to the landowner, it is actually later in date than the main house, meaning someone began building a second dwelling at Roskeen after the first was already established, then abandoned the project before it was ever habitable. Brick window surrounds, a relatively refined finishing detail, were already in place when work stopped, which makes the abandonment feel abrupt rather than gradual.

What remains is a small layered puzzle: a nineteenth-century house occupying a site where a manor once stood, with the ghost of an unfinished successor sitting quietly beside it. The reasons the second building was never completed are unrecorded, but the brick surrounds, framing nothing, give the southern ruin a particular quality of suspended intention.