According to local tradition, Stephen Coppinger was excused forfeiture under the Cromwellian land settlements on account of Cromwell having sheltered there over Christmas 1649, a rare instance of the Lord Protector's campaign through Ireland being remembered as an act of hospitality rather than destruction.

The gate piers at Ballyvolane were described in the 1840s as bearing the date 1641, which would place the original construction just before the catastrophic upheavals of the Confederate Wars and the subsequent Cromwellian conquest. By the late eighteenth century, the house had taken on the character of an early Georgian building, three storeys high with gable ends and a forecourt, as the architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones described it in 1978. Yet behind that composed Georgian face, things were older and stranger. A description from 1908 noted walls of considerable thickness and three unusually shaped gables at the rear, along with small, narrow windows, details that suggested something much earlier was embedded within the later structure. The front portion of the house was taken down around 1800, and whatever remained of the building was demolished in the 1970s.

Nothing now stands at the site. What makes Ballyvolane worth pausing over is less what survives than the layered nature of what was lost: a seventeenth-century core, remodelled and refaced over generations, carrying a Cromwellian anecdote that was remarkable enough to be repeated more than two centuries after the fact, and odd enough that the house's walls seem almost to have held onto it even as everything else was stripped away.