The surviving structures tell a complex story of building and rebuilding across centuries. A rectangular farm building, measuring 17.5 metres east to west and 7 metres north to south, appears to date from the 18th or 19th century but incorporates much earlier features. Most notably, its western wall contains a substantial fireplace and chimney stack that likely dates to the early 17th century, with a square-set fireplace spanning 2.2 metres wide and extending 1.12 metres deep into the wall.

At the eastern end of this farm building, archaeologists have identified the remains of an even older structure; a western wall measuring 9.1 metres north to south, with short returns indicating where the north and south walls once stood. This wall features a slight base batter, a defensive architectural feature common in medieval fortifications, and contains a badly ruined recess in its centre. While only the ground floor level survives for the most part, a portion of the first floor has been incorporated into the upper gable of the adjoining farm building.

Local historian Power, writing in 1918, identified this as ‘a castle of the O’Briens, who held under the Barrymores’, placing the site within the complex web of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lordships that characterised medieval Cork. The O’Briens, a powerful Gaelic family, would have held this castle as vassals of the Barrymores, one of the great Anglo-Norman families who dominated much of east Cork from the medieval period onwards. Today, these fragmentary walls offer a tangible connection to centuries of Irish history, from medieval fortification through to agricultural adaptation.