The building has been empty for well over a century, its rear elevation smothered in ivy, yet the front elevation still presents itself with a certain formal composure: three bays across, double plate-glass sash windows fitted with hood mouldings, and a central porch that suggests someone, in 1843, wanted the place to look considered rather than merely functional.

The national school system in Ireland was established in 1831, and buildings put up in its early decades often followed a recognisable pattern of modest architectural seriousness, neither grand nor entirely plain. This particular structure is two storeys, rectangular in plan with its long axis running east to west, and it had projections extending to both the north and south sides. It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, labelled as Dromagh National School, which places its construction right at the opening of the system's second decade. The rear of the building retains the ghost of its working life in the form of a slightly off-centre doorway, the remains of a projecting wall, and the stub of a stone staircase that once led to the upper floor. Around 1901, a replacement school was built roughly 500 metres to the east, a single-storey, eight-bay structure with a gable end, and the older building was left behind. The two schools separated by that short distance mark out nearly sixty years of rural education in Dromagh, one superseding the other with the matter-of-fact efficiency of institutional life.