That alone is worth pausing over. Domestic buildings from this period are far less likely to survive than churches, tower houses, or earthworks, partly because they were built for ordinary use rather than defence or worship, and partly because later generations simply built over them or quarried their stone for newer walls.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Clare were a period of considerable turbulence and transformation. The Gaelic lordships of the region, including the powerful O'Brien dynasty, were being absorbed, sometimes violently, into the expanding English colonial administration. Houses from this era in rural Connacht and Munster tend to fall into a few broad categories: the fortified house favoured by Gaelic and Old English elites, which combined domestic comfort with the basic defensive features of earlier tower houses; and more modest vernacular structures built by tenants or minor landowners, often in perishable materials but occasionally in stone. A classified monument at Ballyartney suggests something substantial enough to leave a traceable footprint, though without further detail it is difficult to say more about its original form or inhabitants.