The school appears by that same name on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, placing its origins in the era following the establishment of Ireland's national school system in 1831, when the state took its first serious steps toward providing non-denominational elementary education across the country. That the name survives both on the wall and on mid-nineteenth-century cartography gives the building an unusual documentary coherence, a place that has not lost its identity even as its function has changed.

The structure itself is built of random ashlar sandstone, meaning roughly cut stone laid without strict coursing, with dressings in ashlar limestone, the smoother, more precisely worked stone used to frame windows and corners. The northwest elevation runs to six bays, with rectangular window openings now fitted with more recent glazing. A hipped roof sits above, finished with a central chimney whose stepped stone cornice is one of the building's more careful decorative touches. The southeast elevation is more complicated: a lean-to projection of six bays extends outward from the centre, though not all of it is thought to be original, with a door opening cut into each of its side walls. The overall impression is of a building that has been added to and adjusted over time, the lean-to especially suggesting later adaptation to changing needs or numbers.

The school sits on the south side of a road with views northward across the Kenmare River, the long sea inlet that separates the Iveragh and Beara peninsulas in south Kerry. It is a plain, functional building, the kind that does not announce itself, but whose stonework and surviving inscription repay a closer look.