A country house once stood here, in a townland whose name derives from the Irish for a small, dark promontory, and its presence in the landscape points to the pattern of landed settlement that shaped this remote corner of County Galway over several centuries. The western seaboard of Connemara was never easy country for the kind of formal estate architecture that flourished elsewhere in Ireland, and houses that did take root here often did so in exposed, quietly dramatic circumstances.

The broader Renvyle area has long associations with the Anglo-Irish and Protestant landowning families who carved out holdings along the Connemara coastline from the seventeenth century onward. The peninsula is perhaps best known today through its connection with the writer and surgeon Oliver St John Gogarty, who owned Renvyle House further along the same peninsula in the early twentieth century, though Rusheenduff itself occupies its own distinct ground. The townland is small, the kind of place that rarely appears in general histories but whose physical remnants, a house, a walled enclosure, traces of a demesne, speak to a localised history of occupation and tenure that has largely gone unrecorded in popular accounts.