At the end of a passage north of the road in Ballyshehan, County Cork, a two-storey limestone farmhouse stands vacant, its thatched roof deteriorating, its interior still holding the fittings of domestic life as it was lived three centuries ago. The crane and bellows remain beside the large open fireplace in the kitchen. The bread oven, a circular brick-domed recess roughly two-thirds of a metre across and about forty centimetres high, sits on the northwest side of that same hearth, the kind of built-in feature that would have produced the household's bread by retaining heat within its domed chamber after the embers were raked out. These are not museum reconstructions.

The house itself dates to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, built in random-rubble limestone in a rectangular plan measuring just over fifteen and a half metres along its northeast-southwest axis and just over six metres wide. The front elevation faces southeast and originally presented five bays, though the window openings on the end bays have since been blocked, and the sash windows with glazing bars appear to have been inserted at some point after the original construction, replacing whatever earlier arrangement existed. Inside, a central hall distributes the rooms in a pattern common to farmhouses of middling status from this period: a parlour at the southwest end, the working kitchen at the northeast, and a small bedroom off the central hall. Wooden stairs in the kitchen corner rise to a first-floor landing with three bedrooms above. The roof retains its thatch, laid in the traditional manner with wheaten straw over a base of oaten straw, with reeds used at the rear elevation, a layered construction technique that represents a very old and increasingly uncommon form of Irish thatching practice.

Outbuildings attached to the northeast gable have blocked one of the original door openings and an attic window above it, suggesting the farmyard grew incrementally around the house over time, each addition gradually closing off what the original builders had left open.