" Writing in 1907, the Reverend Seymour thought it was probably the coat-of-arms of the Stepney family, the Cromwellian settlers who built the house in the first place. That ambiguity, that slightly uneasy local awareness of something carved and half-buried in the vegetation, says a good deal about Abington House and the layered, uncomfortable history it carries.

The story begins not with the house itself but with what was demolished to create it. In 1681, the lands of Abbey Owney, a medieval monastic site in Co. Limerick, were in the possession of Joseph Stepney, a barrister of the Middle Temple, London, and one of the settlers planted in Ireland under the Cromwellian land redistribution of the mid-seventeenth century. Stepney served as High Sheriff of Co. Limerick in 1686 and later appeared among those attainted, meaning stripped of their rights and property, during the reign of James II. He is credited with having pulled down the greater part of Abbey Owney in order to build Abington House. The current ruins, which the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage dates to around 1790, represent a later structure on the same ground: a detached, L-plan, seven-bay two-storey house with hipped slate roofs, rendered walls, and limestone sills. It stands approximately 220 metres south of the abbey remains and 50 metres south of Abington Bridge on the Mulkear River. By 1907, when Seymour visited, the yard held two pillar bases and several carved stones said to have been fished out of the river, almost certainly salvage from the abbey. There was also a small stone mortar, roughly 15 centimetres high, bearing four projecting lips and the initials C.B. alongside the date 1758. More carved stones had, by that point, already been removed to Clonshavoy House and arranged in a rockery opposite the hall door.

The ruins sit close to Abington Bridge, which provides a useful landmark for anyone approaching along the Mulkear. The house itself is in a state of decay, so the interest here is less in entering a building than in reading the fabric of the place: the rubble limestone and sandstone walls, the ghost of the sash windows, and the knowledge that much of the stone around you may have already had a previous life entirely elsewhere. Whether the carved gate feature Seymour noted still survives beneath the ivy is not recorded.