What makes them quietly unsettling is the function one of them is said to have served: local tradition holds that the main structure was used as a soup kitchen, or porridge house, during the Great Famine, when such places became flashpoints of desperation and, often, of the coercive charity that came with conditions attached.

The buildings are believed to have been constructed around 1817 as part of the Colthurst estate, a landed family whose holdings shaped much of this part of Cork. They sit at the southern edge of a much older archaeological complex associated with St Gobnet, a sixth-century abbess venerated across Munster, whose name attaches to a cluster of monuments in the area. The juxtaposition is telling: early Christian enclosure, post-medieval estate infrastructure, and famine-era relief provision, layered into the same small farmyard. A separate single-storey structure, positioned roughly three metres to the west and similarly built, is believed locally to have been a stable. Both buildings are now derelict and roofless, though their stonework survives in reasonable condition.