The structure had been damaged during the 1641 Rebellion, the widespread and bloody uprising that broke out across Ulster and spread through much of the island, leaving the building a roofless shell. That it was recorded at all, and named on the contemporaneous Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656, tells us something about its scale and the impression it left even in ruin.

The house that once stood here was built by the Bellings family sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, according to research cited by Ronan in 1937. The Bellings were a Catholic family of some prominence in the period, and the description of a 'great stonehouse' suggests a residence of considerable ambition rather than a modest rural dwelling. What rose on that same ground afterwards followed a different pattern entirely. A two-storey house dating to around 1720 was built to the rear, and then, roughly a century later around 1820, a detached five-bay two-storey house was added to the front, along with a farmyard complex to the rear. The result is a layered composition: three distinct periods of building occupying the same ground, each largely indifferent to what came before.

Tyrrelstown today sits in what has become a rapidly developed suburban area of north-west County Dublin, and the house itself is not a public attraction in any formal sense. Those with an interest in the site would do well to approach it with the Down Survey in mind, that extraordinary mid-seventeenth-century mapping project that recorded land ownership and features across Ireland in remarkable detail. The 1820 facade is the face the house presents to the world now, conventional and composed, giving little indication of the older fabric behind it or the ruined walls that preceded everything visible today.