A bawn, in the context of Irish medieval architecture, is a walled enclosure, typically built to protect a tower house and its immediate surroundings. What makes this particular structure unusual is the degree to which it was integrated into that defensive perimeter rather than simply built beside it. The southwest wall of the house is the bawn wall itself, and three cantilever steps projecting from the exterior of the northwest wall continue directly into the adjacent bawn masonry, suggesting the whole complex was conceived and constructed as a single, unified project.

When researchers Ua Cróinín and Breen documented the site in 1996, they found the house measured roughly eight metres along its northeast to southwest axis and just over six metres across. Three of its four walls were standing to a height of approximately three metres, built in mortared stone to a width of 0.8 metres, which is substantial by any standard. An opening in the middle of the southeast wall served as the entrance. The structural logic of the cantilever steps, which climb the exterior face of the northwest wall before continuing along the bawn, was taken as clear evidence that the house and bawn were planned together rather than the house being a later addition slotted into an existing enclosure. The building appears on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as a rectangular structure, and an inspection carried out in 1999 found it unchanged from the 1996 documentation, the walls still intact and the fabric unaltered.