An anchorite was a religious recluse, walled into a small cell attached to a church and dependent on the local community for food and water, so the idea that the same structure was later converted into a tower house and then a mausoleum gives the place an unusually layered quality. What you see today is not one thing but several things occupying the same ground across several centuries.

The site first appears in written records during the ecclesiastical taxation of 1302 to 1306, where it is listed as the 'Chapel Archeriorum' and valued at twenty shillings. Its origins are likely earlier, probably in the Early Historic period, though no documentation survives to confirm this. By the late sixteenth century it had become property caught up in the Crown's redistribution of monastic lands following the Dissolution. In 1567, Christopher Nugent, lord of Delvin, received a lease of the priory of Fore and its associated properties, including the rectory listed as 'Archidiorum'. In 1578 the same lands passed briefly to William Dood, while in that same year a separate lease described the site explicitly as the 'domus anchoristarum', the house of the anchorites, granted to William Pratt, Arland Uschere, and Charles Hewet. Bishop Dopping's visitation of 1682 to 1685 still identified the place as the anchorite's cell, noting that it then functioned as a chapel of St. Feichin's church. The physical remains are a late fifteenth or sixteenth century tower house, with a nineteenth century Nugent family mausoleum built in the style of a church at its west end. Above the mausoleum door, a sandstone plaque bearing the Nugent arms carries an inscription in Roman capitals recording that Richard Nugent, Earl of Westmeath, rebuilt the chapel and castle in 1680 at his own expense, as a burial place and for the pious use of himself and his successors.