What stands today is primarily a late seventeenth-century five-bay gabled house, two storeys high with extensions to both north and south, including a square turret on the southern side that proudly displays the Nugent family crest. But look closer at the stonework and you’ll spot something older: numerous pieces of sparrow-pecked dressed stone, characteristic of fifteenth and sixteenth-century craftsmanship, incorporated throughout the ruins. These fragments almost certainly came from an earlier medieval tower house that once occupied this same spot.

The Nugent family’s connection to Clonyn runs deep through Irish history. When Richard Nugent, Baron of Delvin, died in 1538, an inquisition recorded among his estates ‘Clonyn. A castle and 160a arable; worth £8’. By the time of the Down Survey in the 1650s, the medieval castle had given way to what the surveyors described as ‘the ruines of a fayre house with a fewe backroomes Wherein the Earle of West Meath dwells with a faire orchard and a garden with a grove of trees’. This suggests the house was already partially ruined by then, though still inhabited by the Earl of Westmeath, and surrounded by the remnants of what must have been impressive landscaped grounds.

The building we see today likely represents several phases of construction and reconstruction, with the medieval castle either demolished or incorporated into the ‘fayre house’ mentioned in the 1650s, which was then rebuilt or renovated in the late 1600s. The reuse of medieval stonework in the later building speaks to both practicality and perhaps a desire to maintain some physical connection to the family’s long history at Clonyn. Though the house wasn’t significant enough to appear on the Down Survey maps, these ruins remain an evocative reminder of how Irish country houses evolved over centuries, adapting to changing times whilst carrying traces of their medieval past in their very stones.