It stands beside one of the more quietly intriguing domestic complexes in the county, a fortified house with a formal garden laid out to its east, and the extra wall projecting from the garden's north-east angle suggests the whole arrangement may have been larger and more deliberate than what survives today.

The walled garden and the northward-running wall appear to date from the same period as the fortified house next door. A fortified house, in the Irish context, is broadly what it sounds like: a residential building with defensive features, common among the planter and native gentry classes from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward. Walled gardens were a standard adjunct to such properties, providing shelter for growing fruit, vegetables, and ornamental plants in a climate that offered little natural protection. The additional north-south wall at Cloonbrackna may have enclosed a second garden compartment, or served some other agricultural function; the question remains open. Archaeological testing at the site revealed pits and furrows in the ground that are probably connected to the garden's working history, traces of cultivation or planting that have outlasted whatever grew there by several centuries.