The house around it has long since fallen into ivy-covered decay, its chimneystacks still standing but its roof gone, yet this small carved panel has survived as a deliberate act of self-declaration by one of the most prominent Hiberno-Norman dynasties in the Irish midlands.

The Nugents were Earls of Westmeath, and Clonyn was their seat for centuries. A mid-seventeenth century survey carried out as part of the Down Survey, a mapping project commissioned under the Cromwellian administration to catalogue confiscated Irish land, recorded the place in notably candid terms: 'in Clonyn there is 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.' Even in ruin, it was home. The present structure is broadly thought to have been built on, or to have absorbed, an earlier medieval castle belonging to the Nugents. The core that survives today is a late seventeenth-century five-bay gabled house, two storeys high, built around 1680, and it was to this rebuilt residence that the armorial plaque belongs. Over the following century and a half the house was extended to both north and south, with early nineteenth-century additions made in a Georgian Gothic style, a fashionable idiom that combined pointed arches and castle-like detailing with the proportions of a Georgian country house. By 1913, when the Ordnance Survey revised its twenty-five-inch maps, Clonyn was already recorded as a ruin.

What remains today is a multi-period structure in various states of collapse, with extensive ruinous outbuildings to the north. The plaque on the turret is the detail that repays attention: a small, formal statement of family identity pressed into the fabric of a building that was already, when the survey team came through in the 1650s, something between a residence and a wreck.