What survives here is fragmentary but telling: the north-west corner of a two-storey rectangular building, still standing to its full original height, and capped by a chimney stack bearing a string course, that narrow projecting horizontal band of masonry that was commonly used to shed rainwater and add a touch of architectural formality to otherwise plainly built walls.

The structure measures roughly fourteen metres east to west and seven metres north to south, built from roughly coursed limestone rubble in a manner consistent with domestic building of the late sixteenth or seventeenth century. It stands to the north-east of a tower house known as Clifden Castle, the kind of fortified residence that was the standard dwelling of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman landowners throughout the medieval period in Ireland, and to the south of the later Clifden House. The sequence of buildings on this small patch of Kilkenny farmland traces a familiar arc: a medieval tower house giving way, in time, to a more expansive if still relatively modest house, and then to whatever arrangement followed. The ruined structure appears to represent that middle stage, a transitional domestic building that came after the austerity of the tower house but perhaps before any grander improvement of the property.