The north gable faces the water directly, flanked by two substantial buttresses, and what looks from the outside like a fairly ordinary farmhouse is, at least in part, built of clay. The rear wall batters inward, meaning it leans slightly as it rises, a tell-tale sign of earth or clay construction, and while various owners have tried to compensate for this over the centuries, the tilt is still measurable. The roof timbers, according to the landowner, are original, though the slates are probably nineteenth-century replacements, and the north end of the roof is already beginning to sag under its own age.

The site appears in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 as 'Tynkally', where it is recorded as the principal residence on lands that had belonged to James, Earl of Ormond, in 1640. Following confiscation during the Cromwellian period, the property passed to a Commissary General Reynolds, and the survey is explicit that the chief house of the area stood here. The Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1658, that remarkable Cromwellian cartographic project which documented forfeited Irish lands in extraordinary detail, depict the building as it then stood. That a structure recorded in those surveys is still physically present, if heavily altered, places it in a relatively small category of surviving mid-seventeenth-century domestic buildings in Tipperary. The farm buildings to the west are late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and the present porch appears to have replaced an earlier projecting structure. A canted oriel window in the north gable and a mid-ridge chimney stack are later insertions, each readable as a separate moment of intervention. The landowner also reports that a quay once served the river frontage, though it left no trace on the first or second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting it had already gone by the time those surveys were made.