A large gateway once marked the entrance to the courtyard of a 17th-century fortified house here, set along the line of a bawn wall, the kind of defensive enclosure commonly built around tower houses and fortified residences in early modern Ireland. The gateway is no longer there, but its absence is the point of interest.

In 1907, the gateway was removed from Leamaneh and relocated to Dromoland Castle, where it was repurposed as the entrance to a walled garden. A photograph taken around 1950 shows what remained at the original site by that point, a remnant of the wall still attached to the east, the ghost of an entrance without its frame. The fortified house at Leamaneh itself is associated with one of the more dramatic domestic arrangements in Clare's history, though the gateway's removal belongs to a quieter chapter of institutional tidying, the kind of early 20th-century redistribution of architectural elements that was common among landed estates reorganising their grounds.

Visitors to Leamaneh today will find the ruined house still largely in place, but the gateway they might expect to see at the courtyard boundary is at Dromoland, now in Co. Clare's hotel and golf resort landscape, doing quiet duty as a garden entrance far from the windswept Burren setting for which it was made.