Walk around its four elevations and you are essentially reading a timeline in brick and mortar, each phase grafted onto the last with varying degrees of architectural sympathy.

The oldest identifiable portion sits at the rear of the complex, forming a north-west block that appears to date from the seventeenth century. It is a two-storey, single-pile house built on a T-plan, with a pitched roof, chimneys on both the north and south gables, and a single-bay projection on the west face that rises to roof level. A house in what is now the Duninga area was already significant enough to be marked on the Down Survey barony map of Gowran, produced between 1655 and 1656, one of the earliest systematic land surveys of Ireland, compiled under the direction of William Petty as part of the Cromwellian land settlement. Its marked position in the southern part of the old townland of "Doninee" corresponds closely with the present site of Barraghcore House, which sits roughly three hundred metres west of the River Barrow. By the mid-nineteenth century, the house had grown considerably: a four-bay, two-storey block with a hipped roof and two centrally placed chimneys was added to the east face, with a porch tucked into its re-entrant angle. A further three-bay, two-storey block with a pitched roof, an off-centre chimney, and an attic window was built onto the south-west, either at the same time or shortly after. Wedged between this later addition and the seventeenth-century projection is a three-storey flat-roofed extension, the most incongruous element of the ensemble and the one that most visibly marks the building as a working domestic structure shaped by necessity rather than any unified design ambition.