What makes this structure unusual is the evidence, still legible in its walls, that whoever taught here also lived here, in close and practical proximity to the work of teaching.

The building is a single-storey, gable-ended structure with pointed door and window openings. On its north side sits what was once a single classroom. Adjoining it to the south are two-roomed residential quarters, modest in scale at roughly seven metres by just under six, but notably domestic in their fittings: fireplaces for heat, and a brick-lined oven measuring around forty centimetres high and seventy centimetres in diameter. That oven is the detail that lingers. It places a teacher, or possibly a schoolmaster and family, in residence here, baking bread in the same building where children learned their lessons on the other side of the wall. This kind of combined school-and-teacher's-dwelling was not uncommon in rural Ireland, particularly in the decades following the establishment of the national school system in 1831, when the Board of National Education often encouraged or required that a teacher's residence be built alongside or attached to the schoolroom itself. In remote areas like West Cork, this arrangement made practical sense: it kept the teacher anchored to the community and reduced the cost of maintaining separate structures.

The ruin at Carhoon now stands without its roof, open to the sky, but the interior arrangement of classroom and domestic quarters remains readable in the standing walls. The brick-lined oven, small but precisely described, survives as one of the more tangible domestic details in a landscape where such structures have often collapsed entirely or been absorbed into later farm buildings.