That attribution alone gives the building a peculiar weight. O'Flaherty, the seventeenth-century Connacht historian and antiquarian, spent decades compiling his landmark work on the geography and history of Ireland, yet he died in conditions that can only be described as wretched. A description recorded by Molyneaux in 1709 and later quoted in the Ordnance Survey Letters refers to 'Old O'Flaherty' living in 'a miserable condition', ending his days in extreme poverty. The irony is a pointed one: a man who devoted his life to documenting the deep past was, by the end of it, without comfort or resources of any kind.

O'Flaherty was a member of one of the great Connacht dynasties, the O'Flaherties who had long dominated the territories west of Lough Corrib known as Iar-Connacht. The upheavals of the seventeenth century, including the Cromwellian settlements and their aftermath, stripped such families of land and standing, and O'Flaherty's personal decline was part of a much wider dispossession. His scholarly output, most notably his 'Ogygia' of 1685, earned him correspondence with leading antiquarians of the age, but that reputation brought him no material security. The drystone structure at An Pháirc, built without mortar in the traditional manner of the region, sits in rough pasture that does little to soften the atmosphere of abandonment. Whether the building was genuinely connected to O'Flaherty or whether local memory has simply drawn a scholar's name to an otherwise anonymous ruin is impossible to say with certainty.