That phrase comes from the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, the remarkable cartographic undertaking directed by William Petty that attempted to map forfeited Irish lands in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars. To be singled out in that survey as an elaborate dwelling was no small thing, and it tells us something about the building's scale and presence at a time when much of the Irish countryside was being inventoried for redistribution.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, added a further layer of complexity to the site. He noted that Bawnmore House, the residence of the Bryan family and already a ruin in his time, dated from around 1700, and that a little to the north of it, near the end of the garden, lay the remains of a much older building. That earlier structure is almost certainly the one captured in the Down Survey map, placing it in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The two sites sit in close proximity, suggesting successive generations of occupation on overlapping ground, with one residence quietly superseding the other. The Bryans' later house eventually fell to ruin, and the earlier one retreated further still, to beneath the soil entirely.

Today, nothing of the older building is visible at ground level. Its probable location, based on Carrigan's description, places it north of where Bawnmore House once stood, just west of a garden boundary that appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839. The land remains open grassland, low and gently rolling, with long views in every direction. The site rewards a certain kind of attention, one that accounts for what the ground conceals rather than what it shows.