The Civil Survey of 1654-6 records this as ‘The house & lands of Claire’, which had belonged to Edward Butler of Clare, an Irish Catholic gentleman who died before 1640. By the time of the survey, the property was occupied by Captain Mathew Jacob, who had leased it from the Commissioners of Revenue for seven years and had recently repaired what was described as a ‘good stone house’. The building sits on a raised earthwork with a defensive scarp and berm to the northwest, typical of the defensive measures taken during Ireland’s turbulent plantation period.

This smaller fortified house forms part of a larger defensive complex, occupying the western corner of a bawn, or fortified enclosure. Standing 14.4 metres northwest of a larger fortified house, the two structures were originally connected by a bawn wall; tie-stones still visible at the southern end of the southeast wall show where this defensive wall once joined the buildings together. The house itself measures approximately 9.75 metres by 4.83 metres internally and rises two storeys high, topped with a sturdy rectangular chimney at the southwest gable. Built from limestone rubble in rough courses with cut limestone corner stones, much of the structure has fallen away, leaving the southwest gable intact along with most of the northwest wall and fragments of the southwest wall.

The defensive nature of the house becomes clear in its architectural details. The ground floor featured at least three windows; one in the southwest gable and two in the northwest wall, all designed as flat-headed horizontal openings with chamfered edges, hood-mouldings, and bar-holes for two vertical and one horizontal bar. More intriguingly, a small rectangular opening near ground level in the northwest wall functioned as a gun-loop, widening on the exterior with a projecting stone sill. The first floor, which was supported on wooden beams resting on corbels still visible along the northwest wall, contained a fireplace in the southwest gable and a well-cut circular gun-loop with a chamfered surround, positioned strategically between the southeast wall and the chimney breast. These features paint a picture of a house built not just for comfort but for survival in an era when political and religious tensions could quickly turn violent.