There is no tower, no arch, no carved stonework. Yet the earthworks here preserve the outline of a substantial late medieval or early modern house and its bawn, the term for a walled or embanked courtyard that typically surrounded a defended dwelling of this period. The bawn at Derrypatrick measures approximately fifty metres north to south and thirty metres east to west, its banks and external ditches still legible on three sides, with the raised platform of the house itself tucked into the north-western corner.

By 1640, the property belonged to Walter Plunkett of Dirpatrick, as Derrypatrick was then spelled. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records that he held 175 acres there, along with what it describes as an old stone house, a park of trees, and some thatched houses. That the stone house was already considered old at that date suggests the structure had been standing for some considerable time before the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. The Down Survey of 1656 to 1658, a remarkable cartographic project that mapped landownership across Ireland on the eve of Cromwellian redistribution, depicts a roofless gabled structure beside the church at Dirpatrick, suggesting the building had already fallen into disuse or ruin by that point. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the site in 1836, the house appeared as an oblong footprint, roughly fifteen metres long and five metres wide, set against a rectangular enclosure. A field system that once spread out around the site to the east, south, and west was removed around 2013, which makes the surviving earthworks of the bawn itself all the more significant as a remnant of the wider agricultural and domestic landscape that once surrounded the Plunkett holding. The parish church of Derrypatrick stands approximately sixty metres to the north, a proximity that likely reflects a long-established relationship between the two sites.