A two-storey house recorded in a drawing made in 1795 no longer stands on the west bank of the River Barrow in Co. Kildare, yet its chimney stack, rendered in ink over two centuries ago, offers an unexpectedly precise clue about when it was built. The detail that gives it away is architectural: a single gable-end chimney stack on the east gable, projecting externally beyond the wall face and rising well above the roofline, its top finished with a string-course and moulded shaft. That combination of features is characteristic of seventeenth-century domestic building in Ireland, and it marks this otherwise modest two-storey structure as something worth pausing over.

The house stood a short distance to the north of Woodstock Castle, a thirteenth-century hall house, a type of medieval residence built as a single large first-floor room above a ground-floor undercroft, raised on dry ground above what was otherwise poorly drained floodplain beside the Barrow. Both the castle and the house formed part of a broader settlement visible on the 1656 Down Survey map of Kildare, which shows a cluster of buildings on the west bank of the river, situated between Woodstock Castle and a religious house of the Crutched Friars some 520 metres to the south-south-east. The Crutched Friars, a mendicant order whose name derives from the cross they carried, had been established here by Richard de St. Michael in the thirteenth century, the same figure associated with the construction of Woodstock Castle itself. The 1795 drawing also shows a bawn wall, the enclosed defensive courtyard typical of Irish tower houses and castle complexes, several elements of which have since disappeared entirely from the landscape.

What remains today is largely subterranean. Aerial photographs show wall footings of a single-pile building aligned on an east-west axis to the north of the castle, and these are thought to correspond to the levelled remains of the house seen in the 1795 drawing. Linear earthworks in a nearby waterlogged field to the south-east may represent the outlines of medieval fish-ponds, rectangular enclosures used by religious communities and landowners to manage freshwater fish stocks. The whole area, sitting at the edge of the Barrow's floodplain, holds its history quietly beneath grass and poor drainage rather than in standing stone.