That is not a detail easily brushed past. Five feet of solid stone overhead is not incidental construction; it suggests a structure built to endure, or perhaps to shelter something worth protecting, in a tradition that predates most of what we think of as Irish ecclesiastical architecture.

The building was noted by the Irish Tourist Association Survey in 1944, which recorded its niches and alcoves and drew a tentative but reasonable conclusion: that its position in such close proximity to the local church pointed toward a monastic function. Dry-stone or mortared structures with corbelled roofs of this kind, where courses of stone are laid in overlapping rings until they close at a central point, appear elsewhere in Ireland in early Christian contexts, most famously in the beehive cells of the western seaboard. They were practical, requiring no timber in their construction, and they were durable in a way that wooden buildings simply were not. Whether the Westpalstown example belongs to that tradition, or represents something slightly different, is not established. The survey recorded what it observed and left the question open.

The difficulty for anyone curious enough to look is that the site has not been precisely located, as the survey itself acknowledged. The reference to Miss Keogh's house provides a human anchor, but one that has not been pinned to a map with any confidence in the decades since. The church at Westpalstown offers a starting point, and the logic of the 1944 observation, that the stone building sat near to it, at least narrows the search area. It is the kind of place that may reward a slow walk through the surrounding land with permission sought and a good eye for unusual stonework, rather than a confident arrival at a marked destination.