A bawn was a walled enclosure, typically of lime and stone, built to protect settlers and their livestock; flankers were projecting towers at the corners that allowed defenders to cover the walls. The 1622 inquisition that recorded all of this used unusually warm language for a legal document, calling what John Burnett had built "a fayre castle or cheefehouse, and a bawne of lyme and stone, with two fayre flankers very strong and defensable." Whether the modern house sits directly on those foundations, nearby, or somewhere else entirely, remains unresolved.

Burnett was a Scotsman, a scion of an Aberdeenshire family, who began acquiring land in Monaghan from 1609, part of the wider Ulster Plantation process that reshaped landholding across the province in the early seventeenth century. By 1622 he held land across 130 townlands, a remarkably extensive holding whose previous owners are all named in the inquisition. That inheritance did not survive intact. His children lost it following accusations of rebellion against Charles I, and by the time of Charles II the estate had passed through the female line to the Cole family and others. Richard Westenra purchased it in the early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, cartographic evidence fills in some of the intervening history: a castle or fortified house appears at Ballyleck on McCrea's 1793 map of County Monaghan, and a decade earlier, the 1783 Taylor and Skinner road map of Ireland shows a house at Ballyleck in the ownership of the Montgomery family.

The house itself is still occupied, which means the archaeology beneath or around it is not accessible to visitors. What remains accessible is the layered documentary record, a sequence of maps, inquisitions, and estate histories that traces occupation on this ground across four centuries, even as the physical evidence of the earliest phase of that occupation has quietly disappeared from view.