The brothers didn’t live long to enjoy their holdings, dying in 1626 and 1624 respectively, but their sons Thomas and William stepped into their fathers’ shoes. William took charge of the Cavan portions of what was actually a larger estate stretching into County Laois, and chose to make Bawnboy his administrative centre for the northern properties.

Today, visitors to the site will find only modest remnants of what was once a defensive structure. The surviving ruins consist of a D-shaped tower, sometimes called an open-backed tower, with an internal diameter of about 5 metres running north to south. Built from uncoursed rubble masonry, a construction technique common to the period, the tower shows its age through its weathered, featureless walls. Modern buildings have been attached to the structure, and archaeological evidence suggests these ruins may represent the northwest corner of what was once a larger fortified enclosure, or bawn.

These defensive bawns were typical of Plantation settlements, providing protection for English and Scottish settlers in what was often hostile territory. The Grimes family’s choice of Bawnboy as their seat of power speaks to the strategic importance of the location during this turbulent period of Irish history, when new Protestant landowners were establishing themselves amongst a largely Catholic population who had been displaced from their ancestral lands.