It is a small detail, but it points to something worth noticing about this two-storey farmhouse in north Cork: it was never quite an ordinary dwelling, and its connections to the larger houses around it are more entangled than the building's modest roadside appearance suggests.

The house was built, probably in 1784, as a dower house for Clogheen House. A dower house, in the tradition of landed estates, was a secondary residence provided for a widow of the family, typically smaller than the main house and set at some remove from it. That function explains the careful but restrained architecture: five bays on the road-facing elevation, a central rectangular doorway, chimneys on the gables and one projecting chimney on the south-west. The south-east elevation is less formal, with irregularly placed windows on the first floor set just below the eaves and linked by a brick string course, a horizontal band of brickwork that ties the façade together visually. A photograph taken by Grove White between 1905 and 1925 shows the house still under a thatched roof; that thatch was replaced with slate in 1954 or 1955. The house also shares its piered entrance sweep with Kilmacoom House, a separate building constructed around 300 metres to the east in 1911, which means the two properties, though distinct, were approached through the same gateway and once announced by matched stone lions, one of which has since migrated to Hazelwood.

The farm buildings to the south and a lower two-storey addition to the south-west give the property a working, layered quality, the kind of place that has been added to and adapted rather than preserved in amber. The modern windows and doors on the road-facing side are a reminder that buildings of this sort tend to be lived in continuously across generations rather than left to decay picturesque, which is perhaps why they so often go unnoticed.