It is easy to overlook, and that is rather the point. What looks at first like a modest irregularity in the ground may in fact be the ghost of a walled garden or inner courtyard, its original stonework long since robbed out or collapsed, leaving only the sunken square as evidence that something deliberate and domestic once occupied this spot.

The enclosure sits within the bawn of a tower house, the bawn being the defensive walled enclosure that typically surrounded such structures in late medieval and early modern Ireland, offering protection for livestock and household alike. The tower house itself rises on the western edge of a limestone ridge that climbs gradually eastward, and the whole complex commands a clear view over the valley of the Clashawley river below, a position chosen as much for surveillance as for shelter. The sunken area measures roughly 12.5 metres north to south and 15.1 metres east to west, dimensions that suggest a deliberate and reasonably substantial enclosure rather than an accidental hollow. Significantly, its orientation appears to align with a seventeenth-century gateway into the bawn, which implies that the enclosure formed part of a coherent plan for how the site was to be entered, ordered, and used during that period. Whether it functioned as a kitchen garden, an ornamental space, or simply a sheltered courtyard is not known for certain.