At its heart lies a late sixteenth or early seventeenth-century tower house, originally built as a defensive residence for the Butler family. By 1654, when Civil Survey records described it as a ‘castle in repayre a bawne out of repayre & a windmill in repayre’, the site had already seen significant development. The four-storey tower house was subsequently expanded with additional buildings in the mid to late seventeenth century, eventually evolving into an elaborate H-plan mansion during the eighteenth century.

What makes this site particularly fascinating is its unusually large bawn; a fortified enclosure measuring 76 metres northeast to southwest by 137 metres northwest to southeast. Built directly on bedrock from randomly coursed sandstone rubble, the walls stand between 5.3 and 7 metres high and incorporate sophisticated defensive features. The bawn contains numerous gun loops at both ground and wall-walk levels, with a concentration of sixteen horizontal gun loops along the northern section of the northeast wall alone. A corner bartizan, supported by five corbels, once protected the northwest angle, whilst a projecting tower midway along the southwest wall provided additional defensive capability, though both structures have been altered over time.

The evolution of the bawn’s entrances reveals the changing needs of its inhabitants across the centuries. The original southeast entrance, 3.6 metres wide, was later supplemented by additional gateways, including an eighteenth-century entrance to accommodate the mansion’s grander aspirations. A particularly charming detail is the small pedestrian entrance featuring a round-headed arch with roughly cut sandstone surrounds, squeezed between the original northwest gateway and its eighteenth-century neighbour. The northern sector of the bawn was raised and landscaped during the Georgian period, with a retaining wall that partially blocks the original northwest entrance; evidence of how military fortifications gradually gave way to more genteel residential requirements.