That it has been catalogued at all suggests something worth noting: not every building from this period makes it onto such lists, and the fact that this one did points to some quality of age, form, or fabric that sets it apart from the ordinary run of rural structures.

Kilgobnet, as a place name, carries the trace of an early Irish saint, Gobnat, who is particularly associated with County Cork and whose name appears in several townlands across the region. Whether the house has any connection to older settlement patterns in the area, or whether it simply represents the kind of modest rural building that became more common as the eighteenth century brought shifting land use and new landlord ambitions to Munster, is not something the surviving record makes clear. What can be said is that houses of this period in Cork could range considerably: from the solid farmhouses of comfortable tenants to the more modest dwellings of smallholders, each carrying in its walls and roofline something of the economic and social conditions that produced it.