On a bluff above the Finisk River in the west of County Waterford, a small fortification once held a garrison of just twenty men, assigned to watch over one of the quieter routes into County Tipperary. What makes the place quietly odd is that it is still in use, occupied today by a Garda station, meaning a structure built to project early eighteenth-century military authority now serves as a rural police post. The continuity is almost too neat to be accidental.

The barracks appears on a map produced by Herman Moll in 1714, which gives a firm upper limit for its construction. Charles Smith, writing in his 1746 history of County Waterford, describes it plainly as "a redoubt for twenty men", a redoubt being a small, self-contained defensive enclosure, typically without the full complexity of a larger fort. The site is rectangular, measuring roughly 90 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west, with corner bastions projecting outward in the manner standard to European military engineering of the period, and a single entrance on the western side. Its position was chosen with care: it sits where a northeast-to-southwest stream meets the north-to-south Finisk River some 50 metres to the northwest, in the corridor between the Knockmealdown and Comeragh Mountains. Anyone moving between Waterford and Tipperary through that valley would have been visible from the bluff. A garrison of twenty was probably sufficient for the task of observation and deterrence rather than any serious defence against a large force.