A machicolation is a projecting parapet with floor openings through which stones or other objects could be dropped on anyone trying to force an entry below. It is the kind of feature you expect on a castle gatehouse, not on a townhouse gable. That this one survives here, roughly seven metres high and at least six metres wide, on a slight eastward-facing slope about a hundred and twenty metres from the Owenduff and Corrock river, says something about the kind of place Clonmines once was, and the kind of times its residents lived through.

Clonmines was a walled medieval borough on the Barrow estuary, prosperous enough in its day to support several tower houses, a priory, and a community of some density. This house, dating to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, sits roughly a hundred and six metres south of the Black Castle, one of those tower houses, which itself had a building attached on its southern side. Researchers have wondered whether a continuous street of houses once connected the two structures. A remote sensing survey carried out in the mid-1990s examined the intervening ground for exactly that purpose, but the results were inconclusive; there were some indications of collapsed floors and walls beneath the surface, though nothing definitive enough to confirm or rule out a built-up street. That uncertainty is itself a small reminder of how much of the town's layout remains unresolved, legible only in fragments.