What survives is a single legal reference, recorded at an inquisition held in New Ross on 19th October 1631, which noted that Arthur Keating, son of Oliver Keating, possessed a court associated with the castle at Kilcowan. The suspicion is that this court functioned as a bawn, the term for a defensive enclosure, typically walled, that surrounded or adjoined a tower house or castle and provided a protected space for livestock and household activity. Bawns were a standard feature of later medieval and early modern fortified settlements in Ireland, but they have survived poorly, often dismantled for building stone or simply absorbed into later farmyards.

The inquisition at New Ross was a formal legal proceeding of the kind used in early seventeenth-century Ireland to establish who held what land and under what terms, particularly in the decades following the upheavals of the Tudor conquest. That Arthur Keating was identified as the possessor of this court places the Keating family at Kilcowan at a moment when such records were being gathered with some urgency by the crown. The castle itself, a separate recorded monument, would have been the obvious anchor point for any associated enclosure, and the assumption is simply that the courtyard lay close by. Beyond that, the documentary trail goes quiet.