These are bee boles, shallow niches built into garden walls specifically to shelter straw beehives, known as skeps, from wind and rain. Each opening is topped with a lintel, roughly 0.66 metres high and 0.53 metres wide, and while the nine boles vary slightly in size, they follow a consistent design along the wall's face.

Bee boles are a relatively rare survival in Ireland, more commonly associated with kitchen gardens attached to ecclesiastical or estate properties. The word "bole" derives from an old Scots term for a small recess or alcove. Before framed wooden hives became standard, beekeepers relied on woven skeps, which offered no protection against wet weather on their own. Positioning them inside stone-built boles in a south-facing wall gave the bees warmth from reflected sunlight and shelter from prevailing winds, making a practical difference to colony survival over winter. The walled garden at Glebe Marsh, originally laid out in terraces, would have been a working productive space, and the row of nine boles suggests beekeeping was taken seriously here rather than kept as a casual domestic afterthought.