Beneath and around it lies the ghost of an earlier building, a large mansion erected by the Kennedy family in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, of which not a single visible trace now remains above ground.

The Kennedy mansion was destroyed during the Williamite War, the conflict of the late 1680s and early 1690s that followed James II's displacement from the throne and played out with considerable violence across Ireland. Whatever stood here was lost in that upheaval. By 1784, the site had passed into different hands, and the architect Thomas Cooley completed a new house there for Robert Cuningham. Cooley, who was also responsible for the Royal Exchange in Dublin (now City Hall), brought a composed, late-Georgian sensibility to the replacement building. The demesne also sits roughly fifty metres south-west of a large possible motte, the kind of raised earthen mound associated with early Norman fortification, suggesting that this particular patch of Wicklow has attracted settlement and strategic interest across several centuries.