Two storeys, three bays, an L-shaped plan. Nothing about the exterior would prompt a second glance. But step inside the eastern portion of the building and the walls are noticeably thicker than the rest, and a low-set, squat internal door in the living room sits at odds with the proportions around it. These are the kinds of details that suggest the house is not quite what it seems.

The clue to its deeper history comes from the Down Survey, a remarkable mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to document land ownership across Ireland following the conquest. The barony maps produced between 1655 and 1656 show a small house in the approximate location of Ballydulea, which raises the possibility that the present building absorbed or was built around the shell of an earlier structure, one that may date to the seventeenth century or even earlier. That said, no architectural features clearly datable to that period are visible in the current house. The thick walls and the awkward little doorway are suggestive rather than conclusive, traces of something older that the building has quietly folded into itself over successive generations of alteration and reuse.