The enclosure, roughly 38 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, is bounded by high stone walls on three sides, with a diagonal concrete wall and a derelict nineteenth-century house closing the southern edge. What gives the site away is in the masonry itself: the lower courses of the stone walls are noticeably thicker than those above, suggesting the present structure was rebuilt on much earlier foundations rather than constructed from scratch.

The farmyard sits around 300 metres south-east of Castlelyons Castle, the former seat of the Earls of Barrymore, and the connection between the two sites is very likely more than geographical. The buildings here were presumably part of the castle's agricultural or service complex, and an 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map places a structure labelled "Barrymore Barn" close to what is marked as "Stables", suggesting the two may originally have stood adjacent to one another. Later editions of the same map shift the barn eastward, to a location now occupied by a late nineteenth-century Parochial House, which complicates any straightforward reading of how the site developed over time. Aside from those thickened lower wall courses, no features within the yard appear to predate the late eighteenth century, so whatever earlier use the site saw, it has been substantially overlaid by more recent farm activity.