Its bargeboards, the ornamental trim running along the roofline gables, are carved with care, and the lattice windows give it an almost domestic warmth. A date stone reads 1841, the year before the site appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a fully enclosed rectangular complex. That combination, ornamental detail applied to an institution built for the destitute, is one of the quieter contradictions of Irish Poor Law architecture.

The Rathbeg workhouse was constructed as part of the network of Poor Law Union buildings established across Ireland in the years leading up to the Famine, when the state committed to housing and feeding those who had nothing. The complex followed a standard layout: a central accommodation block at its core, an infirmary to the rear, and a connecting range running east to west between them. The gatehouse and warden's house sat on the eastern side, marking the formal threshold of the institution. Of all this, the central accommodation block has not survived, though the connecting range still projects from the infirmary's central elevation, a stub of masonry that suggests the scale of what once stood there. The infirmary itself remains the most substantial remnant, a long two-storey gable-ended building running to twenty-three bays. It now functions as a hospital, which gives it a continuity of purpose that the rest of the site has lost. Part of the original enclosing stone wall still stands. By 1902, the Ordnance Survey was recording a burial ground to the south of the complex, the unmarked consequence of a place where the sick and the starving were brought when there was nowhere else to go.

The gatehouse, with its dormer windows and flanking two-storey wings, now serves as offices. It is an unusual survival: a building designed to project a degree of civic seriousness, and perhaps even reassurance, at the entrance to a place most people entered only in desperation.