It is the original dwelling house where Michael Collins was born on the 16th of October 1890, and it survived largely because it stopped being a house. Around 1900 the Collins family moved into a newer building closer to the entrance of the property, and the old structure was quietly demoted to a farm out-building, a change of use that may well have preserved it.

Collins went on to become one of the most consequential figures of the Irish revolutionary period, serving as Chairman of the Provisional Government and Commander in Chief of the National Army before his death at the age of thirty-one. The site at Woodfield did not escape the violence of the era entirely. The farmhouse near the entrance was burned by the Essex Regiment in April 1921 during the War of Independence, and only its footprint remains, a scorched outline in the ground that speaks plainly to how the conflict reached into domestic and rural life. Collins himself was killed less than two years later, on the 22nd of August 1922, in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, also in County Cork, carried out by anti-treaty forces during the Civil War. The family sold the homestead and farm in 1923, the year after his death.

The State purchased the property and opened it to the public in 1990, a hundred years after Collins's birth, and it was formally vested in the Commissioners of Public Works the following year as a national monument. What visitors find is not a grand memorial but a working farmyard reduced to its essentials: a birth room that became a barn, and the outline of a building that was deliberately destroyed, both still present in the same small space.