The wall is all that survives, to any meaningful height, of what was once a substantial early nineteenth-century infantry barracks, and its current position as a dividing line between two entirely unrelated modern uses gives it a quietly surreal quality. Ivy has colonised most of the surface, but look closely and the blocked window openings are still legible in the masonry, row after row of them, sealed up and going nowhere.

By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it at six inches to the mile, the complex covered roughly 280 metres square. Three long ranges occupied the north, west, and south sides of that square, with a central range running north to south through the middle and smaller buildings arranged around the perimeter. By 1906 the same maps were naming a hospital, a ball alley, a pump house, and a church within the enclosure, suggesting a community that functioned almost entirely within its own walls. The surviving central range once had a central archway surmounted by a cupola. Almost all of that internal fabric has since been demolished or reduced to rubble, but the high perimeter wall is largely intact, and the cut-stone arched entrance gateway in the centre of the east wall still stands, flanked by ordnance stones, which are the boundary markers used by the military to define the limits of Crown property. Across the road to the south, a run of late nineteenth-century residential housing once served the barracks and remains in place, the last legible trace of the settlement that grew up around the garrison.