That detail is quietly remarkable: a house substantial enough to appear on the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, and still noteworthy enough in 1750 for the Cork historian Charles Smith to describe its canal, stocked with fish and stretching before the facade, had fallen silent before anyone thought to document it systematically. By 1837, a local account recorded that it had been a ruin "for many years". No dramatic collapse, no recorded disaster; just a slow disappearance that left the place half-forgotten while it was still standing.

Smith's 1750 description gives the clearest picture of what Mountnorth Court once was: a square building with two wings, and in front of it a canal well stocked with fish, the kind of formal water feature that placed its owners among the fashionable improving gentry of the period. The main house is now reduced to fragments of a basement wall, its shallow brick-arched recesses just over a metre high. The western wing survives as an ivy-clad shell, its walls rising from a shallow plinth to window-sill height, six bays wide on the western elevation and faced in cut-limestone ashlar on the narrower southern side. The eastern wing fared differently: by the time the 1905 Ordnance Survey map was made, it had been replaced by a rectangular structure of nineteenth-century appearance, built largely from stone salvaged from the earlier house. This building, known as the Steward's House, still stands as a two-storey residence, its entrance front of five bays centred on a doorway with a block-and-start surround beneath a wide pediment, a modest but considered piece of domestic architecture assembled, in part, from the bones of what came before it.