Their terrier, a written companion to the maps, noted 'the ruines of a fayre house with a fewe backroomes wherein the Earle of West Meath dwells, with a faire orchard and a garden with a grove of trees.' The Earl was apparently living among the rubble, which tells you something about the turbulence of the period, and possibly something about the stubbornness of the Nugent family, who had held the place for well over a century by that point.

The Nugents, Barons of Delvin, had a castle at Clonyn before there was any house. An inquisition held in 1538 into the estate of the recently deceased Richard Nugent, Baron of Delvin, listed 'Clonyn. A castle and 160 acres arable; worth £8' among his holdings. The house that eventually replaced or absorbed that castle was probably built around 1680, and its core, a five-bay, two-storey gabled structure, still stands to that height in ruined form. A plaque dated 1680 bearing the Nugent crest survives on a square turret added to the south side of the building. Embedded throughout the fabric of the ruins are pieces of sparrow-pecked dressed stone, a finishing technique associated with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, suggesting that material from the earlier medieval castle was cannibalised and worked into the later construction. Extensions followed across the next century and more, including early-nineteenth-century additions in a Georgian Gothic style, a mode that combined the symmetry of Georgian architecture with pointed arches and other medieval references then fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its 25-inch maps in 1913, the structure was already being recorded as a ruin.

What survives today is an ivy-clad accumulation of centuries. To the east of the house there is a rectangular enclosure on two levels, most likely the remains of a parterre, a formal garden laid out in geometric patterns, bounded by a low battlemented wall. This feature does not appear on the earlier 1837 Ordnance Survey map, which places its construction sometime after that date. Ruinous outbuildings extend to the north of the main house, completing a site that has been quietly decaying for the better part of three hundred years.