Yet before that final clearance, there was enough here to read an unusually legible architectural biography, one in which a later, more polished house had been built directly onto and between the gables of an earlier structure, the newer wrapped around the bones of the old.

The building that survived long enough to be recorded was a single-storey house of five bays, with four stone steps rising to a central round-headed doorway and rectangular window openings fitted with 18th-century moulded stone sills. But the older material embedded within it was the more telling detail. The steeply pitched southern gable, which had once been an internal wall of a 17th-century house, retained a large ground-floor fireplace measuring over one and a half metres wide, with a dressed ashlar limestone surround and a chamfered edge. Attached to it on the western side were the remains of a brick-domed bread oven with two flues, the kind of domestic feature that speaks to a working household rather than a purely decorative architectural ambition. A narrower, brick-arched fireplace survived at first-floor level in the same gable, and a small fireplace occupied a shallow projection on the gable's northern side. The interior was divided by a central hallway just over four metres wide, with roughly square rooms to either side. An abandoned range of two-storey farm buildings stood nearby. A house in this vicinity also appears on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, the mid-17th-century mapping project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to record landownership across Ireland, suggesting occupation on or near this spot across several centuries.