It is the kind of feature that registers now only as an absence, a slight irregularity in the ground cover that most walkers would pass without a second thought.

Fish-ponds of this type were once a practical element of Irish and British estate management, maintained to supply fresh fish to the house and to signal, in their own modest way, the orderliness of a well-run property. That this one was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 tells us it was considered a feature worth noting at the time of that first systematic mapping of the Irish countryside, a project that remains one of the most detailed cartographic surveys of nineteenth-century rural Ireland. By the time of any recent examination, however, the pond had become overgrown, its outlines softened by whatever scrub and undergrowth took hold after it fell out of use. The relationship between the pond and Oldtown House suggests a domestic or estate function, though the specific history of the house and its occupants is not recorded here.