The house at Arbourhill sits in gently undulating terrain, unassuming in its proportions, three bays wide with a hipped roof and a roughly central chimney. Its fenestration is irregular, suggesting the building has been widened at some point, and a modern porch has been added to the doorway. These are the small, accumulated alterations of a place that has been lived in continuously, adjusted to suit each generation without much ceremony.

The paper trail behind the house stretches back to the mid-seventeenth century, when two of the most significant land surveys in Irish history recorded what stood here. The Civil Survey, conducted between 1654 and 1656, noted that in 1640 there was a thatched house and a few cabins in the townland then called Mogorban, and that the proprietor was James, Earl of Ormond. Ormond was one of the most powerful figures in Stuart Ireland, head of the Butler dynasty and a major player in the political upheavals of the period. The Down Survey, carried out in 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty to facilitate the redistribution of land following the Cromwellian conquest, depicts three houses in the same vicinity. It is possible, though not certain, that the thatched structure noted in those surveys is embedded in the present building, its walls thickened and remodelled over the intervening centuries into the house that stands today.