These defensive walls were common features of the Irish countryside, built to protect landowners’ homes during turbulent times. The 1837 Ordnance Survey map shows the name annotated next to a cluster of three buildings with a walled garden to the east, all reached by a long driveway leading south.

When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 1980, they found no trace of a castle or any standing remains of the bawn wall that the place name hints at. The only structure they encountered was a two-storey farmhouse, which the occupant reckoned was about 200 to 300 years old at that time, placing its construction sometime in the late 1600s or 1700s. This timing would align with the post-1700 date suggested for the original bawn.

The site sits just over a kilometre north of Togher Castle, another fortified structure in the area. Whether the Bawn ever had its own defensive walls or simply borrowed its name from proximity to other fortifications remains a mystery; the physical evidence has long since vanished, leaving only the place name on old maps as a tantalising clue to what might once have stood here in County Westmeath’s contested landscape.