This spot, where the river bends westward, was once home to an O’Kelly castle that stood from at least 1487 until its destruction around 1595. By 1640, the site had passed into the hands of the Earl of Clanrickard, who likely commissioned the fortified house that replaced the medieval stronghold sometime in the early 17th century.

The surviving structure is an impressive rectangular building that once stood three storeys high with an attic level, measuring roughly 15 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west internally. Though only the north and south gables remain intact today, these walls still display fireplaces at each floor level. Two rectangular towers, also three storeys with attics, flank the northeast and southeast corners of the main building. These towers, measuring about 5.4 by 5.1 metres internally, feature fireplaces on their western walls and windows on the remaining sides, with distinctive gables on both their eastern and western walls.

What makes this site particularly fascinating is its setting within a carefully engineered landscape. The house sits within a walled garden approximately 100 by 90 metres, which is itself surrounded by a mill race; a man-made channel that appears today as a grass-covered depression, 8 to 10 metres wide, that still floods during winter months. This waterway connects with the River Suck both upstream and downstream of the house, creating what the 1636 Strafford map depicted as an island. The same map shows several houses clustered near the fortified house and marks a church on the river’s western bank. Beyond the immediate grounds, fragments of old field banks covering about 8 hectares stretch north and east of the house, including traces of an east-west roadway roughly 100 metres long, defined by earthen banks with outer ditches; remnants of the estate’s former extent.