The house that stood near what is now No. 130 Ranelagh Village was not simply a private dwelling; it belonged to the Keeper of Cullenswood, a role that carried responsibility for managing the ancient wood that gave the surrounding area its name. The building survived into the nineteenth century before being demolished around 1850, leaving in its place the comparatively modest Cullenswood Lodge, which still stood beside the cleared ground.

The occupant recorded in the early seventeenth century was a Thomas Ward, who held the position of Keeper of Cullenswood in the first half of the 1600s. Ward's name enters the historical record most vividly through a set of depositions made in 1642, documents collected in the aftermath of the 1641 Ulster rebellion, when thousands of Protestant settlers across Ireland gave sworn testimony about losses and violence they had suffered. In his deposition, Ward described how his house and offices at Cullenswood had been totally destroyed by fire, a detail preserved by the historian Ball writing in 1903 and later cited by Kelly in 1995. The precise circumstances of the fire, whether accidental or deliberate, are not recorded in the surviving notes, but the timing places it squarely within the period of widespread disruption that followed the outbreak of the rebellion.

The site today sits within an area that has been densely built over since the Victorian period, and there is no standing fabric from Ward's time. Visitors with an interest in the layers beneath Ranelagh's nineteenth and twentieth century streetscape might find it worth pausing near the village to consider what the land looked like when Cullenswood itself was still a managed woodland on the edge of the city. The name Cullenswood persists in local usage and in the name of the lodge that replaced the keeper's house, which offers a faint thread of continuity for anyone tracing the neighbourhood's older geography on foot.