Walls that once defined a substantial residence now serve as stable and garden boundaries, their original purpose legible only to those who know to look. The gateway that leads from the bawn into the stables, a bawn being the enclosed courtyard typical of Irish fortified houses of this period, appears to predate the bawn wall itself, since it is closed off from outside rather than integrated into it. Beside that archway sits a small roofless chamber, its function unrecorded, its stonework surviving.

The earliest documentary evidence for the site comes from the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, a remarkable mapping project commissioned after the Cromwellian conquest to catalogue landownership across Ireland. The parish map of Coolerahin shows a house with a chimney drawn in the townland of Foulksrath, and the accompanying terrier, a written description paired with the map, notes that there was a castle in repair there, along with some cabins. The proprietor at that time was recorded as Phillip Pursall, identified as an Irish Papist, the standard administrative label applied to Catholic landowners in the post-conquest surveys. Whether Pursall built the structure or inherited it is not clear from what survives. Writing in the 1880s, a local historian named Wright described what remained as the ruins of a large manor-house or court, noting that his father had seen them in a considerably more complete state roughly a century earlier. By Wright's own time, the building had already been substantially absorbed into later agricultural structures.

The precise location of the original house within the townland has not been established with certainty, and the relationship between the surviving fabric and the structure marked on the Down Survey map remains a matter of inference rather than confirmed fact. What endures is fragmentary: a gateway older than the wall it now sits in, a roofless chamber to one side, and stretches of masonry that once formed the outline of something considerably grander.