Myrtle Grove, sitting quietly beside St Mary's Church in Youghal, was not, and it has been lived in continuously ever since, making it one of the earliest unfortified houses in the country to have remained in domestic use without interruption. That alone would make it unusual. The fact that it was once the base of Sir Walter Raleigh, courtier, explorer, and briefly mayor of Youghal, adds a layer that tends to surprise people who encounter it for the first time.

The building began life in 1464, founded by Richard Benet under a charter from Thomas Fitzgerald, the 8th Earl of Desmond, as a college for choristers attached to the collegiate church of Youghal, with an additional function as the warden's residence. After the Desmond Rebellion of 1586, the Earl's considerable lands around Youghal and Lismore were granted to Raleigh, who used this house alongside Lismore as his Irish base and served as mayor of Youghal from 1588 to 1599. The house is rectangular, two storeys in height with an inhabited attic, and its roofline of three transverse gables on both front and back elevations, combined with prominent chimneys, gives it the characteristic Elizabethan silhouette that the exterior still broadly presents today. The windows were modernised at some point, and in 1897 the building was put into thorough repair, which accounts for its somewhat fresher external appearance relative to its age. Inside, certain rooms are lined with floor-to-ceiling oak panelling topped with dentilled friezes, a form of decorative moulding using small block-like projections. The room known as Raleigh's drawing room retains a richly carved oak chimneypiece whose cornice rests on three carved figures representing Faith, Hope and Charity, with circular-headed panels and emblematical devices filling the remaining surface; the fireplace itself is lined with blue and white tiles and flanked by a pair of caryatid figures, carved oak supports shaped as human forms. In 1616, Sir Lawrence Parsons took the house from the Earl of Cork, and it passed through the hands of the Hedges family in the seventeenth century and the Hayman family in the eighteenth. It remains a private residence.