Glebe houses, as a building type, are inseparable from the history of the Church of Ireland: they were the residential properties attached to Protestant parishes, built or assigned to house the local rector, and funded in many cases through tithes levied on a predominantly Catholic rural population. That history made them objects of considerable resentment, and many did not survive the upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries intact. The fact that a glebe house in Killeely More, in County Galway, has been recorded as a monument of interest places it in a category of structures whose social and architectural significance often outpaces what is immediately visible from the road.

Glebe houses varied considerably in scale and ambition. Some were modest, functional farmhouses in all but name; others were substantial Georgian or Victorian residences, designed to project a degree of permanence and authority in the landscape. In Connacht, where the imbalance between the established church and the local population was particularly acute, the glebe house was a charged presence. The Congested Districts, the Land War, and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 all reshaped what these buildings meant and who, eventually, came to own them. Many passed into private hands, were absorbed into farm complexes, or fell into slow ruin after their original institutional purpose dissolved.