The ornate structure sits at the south-east corner of a complex covering roughly two hundred metres square, its roofless one- and two-storey buildings now half-swallowed by overgrown gardens. Wooden changing cubicles still stand inside the shell of a former Turkish Bath. The whole place carries the particular strangeness of an institution that was once full of purposeful activity and is now largely quiet.

The complex began in 1843 when a Dr Barter established the facility on the site of St Ann's Hill, a country house already recorded on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. Barter's institution was a hydropathic establishment, a type of health resort that became fashionable across Britain and Ireland in the Victorian era, based on the therapeutic use of water in various forms, including baths, wraps, and directed streams. The site was significantly enlarged and refurbished during the 1870s, and reached its period of greatest activity between roughly 1870 and 1910, according to research presented by Joe O'Leary to the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society in February 1993. Among the surviving structures is a two-storey building on the north side of the complex that once served as an isolation unit for patients, a standard feature of Victorian health establishments, and which has since been converted to residential use. The plaster detailing still visible on some of the remaining walls gives a sense of the ambition behind the original construction.