The fireplaces that once warmed its interior survive only in fragments, the large wooden lintels long gone, and the sidewalls have reduced to short stubs returning from the gables. What lingers, though, is a more particular strangeness: this was a plantation house that someone thought worth defending with earthworks and wooden balconies bolted to opposite corners, a domestic building that briefly became a fortification.

The house was built around 1673 as part of the Kerry estates of Sir William Petty, the physician, surveyor, and political economist who acquired vast tracts of Munster land following the Cromwellian settlement and spent considerable energy trying to make them productive. By 1683 Petty was referring to it in his journal as 'Killowen house', a name that has since caused confusion with a separate structure in the same townland recorded differently on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. The distinction matters because this particular building had its own short violent episode: according to local tradition, it was the site of a siege in 1688 or 1689, during the upheavals that followed the Williamite and Jacobite conflict. Earthworks were thrown up around it for defence, and the wooden balconies added to two corners served the same purpose, though neither the balconies nor the earthworks have left any visible trace. A later description recorded by McCarthy captures something of the house before its decline: four large rooms, a garret, and two fine hearths with high chimneys, which suggests a building of some ambition for its setting, a frontier residence making gestures toward comfort and permanence in a landscape that was, at the time, anything but settled.