Turn to the east gable, however, and a much older story begins to show itself. The house was built directly onto the wall of a medieval tower house, and a projecting chimney with a massive stack and diagonal shafts survives there, a feature that architectural historians associate with seventeenth-century construction. The result is a building that has quietly accumulated several centuries of Irish history in its stonework, each phase readable if you know where to look.

The land itself changed hands under the particular violence of the Cromwellian settlement. According to O'Kelly, writing in 1969, the Garryhiggin lands were forfeited by John Grace in 1653 and granted to a Cromwellian captain named Charles Gore, who gave his portion of the estate the name Goresgrove. The five-bay, two-storey stone house Gore or his immediate successors built was attached to the east wall of the existing tower house, a pragmatic arrangement that was not uncommon in the period, when new settlers sometimes incorporated or simply annexed earlier medieval structures rather than clearing them. The front facade was later remodelled to give the house the more regular appearance it carries today, with a parapet above the cornice lending it a degree of civic seriousness that sits in quiet contrast to the rougher medieval fabric at its back.