The walls, where they survive, run between 0.65 and 0.75 metres thick and contain brick alongside the stonework. The rectangular structure measured roughly 11.6 metres east to west and 6.6 metres north to south internally. It sits on a south-facing slope at the edge of a stand of mature deciduous trees, with a stream running north to south about ten metres to the east, a setting that feels more domestic than dramatic, which makes what happened here all the stranger.

The house is associated with the Cullen family and was long reputed to be of seventeenth-century origin, though the Cullens do not appear among the grantees of the 1620s, as noted by Mac an Ghallóglaigh in 1971, which complicates the tradition. The architecture itself, such as it is, points more towards the eighteenth century. Whatever its precise origins, the house had a grim final chapter: in the period before it was demolished around 1850, it served as a hospital during a cholera epidemic, one of the waves of disease that swept through rural Ireland in the decades before and after the Famine. By then the Cullens had already moved to Glenade House, as Faughnan recorded in 1943, and the old building was left to come down. A house that had been a family seat became a fever ward, and then a ruin on a quiet Leitrim hillside.