The site centres around a house built in 1727 by Denis O’Conor, who had managed to reclaim a portion of his family’s ancestral lands just seven years earlier in 1720. This modest victory came after decades of land confiscations that had stripped many old Irish families of their estates.

The house would become most famous as the home of Denis’s son, Charles O’Conor, one of 18th-century Ireland’s most celebrated antiquarians and historians. Charles dedicated his life to preserving Irish manuscripts and historical documents at a time when Gaelic culture faced systematic suppression. The building sits at the northwest corner of a walled courtyard, or bawn, measuring 34 metres on each side. These stone walls, roughly 0.7 metres thick and reaching heights of up to 3 metres in places, create an enclosed space typical of Irish domestic architecture from this period.

While the term ‘bawn’ typically refers to the defensive walls surrounding plantation castles and tower houses from earlier centuries, this particular example appears to be a later construction, likely contemporary with the house itself rather than a medieval fortification. The O’Conor house and its courtyard represent a fascinating transition period in Irish architecture and society; built by a Catholic family regaining a foothold on their ancestral lands during the Protestant Ascendancy, it would become a centre for preserving the very culture that the prevailing authorities sought to diminish.