That date places it squarely in one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history, just two years after the outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion, and the plaque reads less like decoration than a statement of defiance or identity, carved into stone at a moment when everything around it was uncertain.

The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records that in 1640 Sir Richard Butler of Knocktopher, County Kilkenny, described in the survey's blunt official language as an "Irish Papist", had in Mauganstown "a stone house as yet not fully finished, the walls onely standing, built by Sr. Rich. Butler little before ye. Rebellion". The Down Survey, a mid-seventeenth-century mapping project that recorded land ownership across Ireland, also places a house at approximately this location. Whether the present building is the very same structure Butler was raising when war interrupted his plans is not certain, but the armorial plaque suggests a close connection. The building as it stands today is a two-storey, four-bay house with gable chimneys and a single-storey wing on either side, along with a two-storey extension to the rear. The main doorway is noticeably off-centre, and where later render has fallen away at the north-east corner, cut limestone quoins are visible beneath. The fenestration and roof pitch point strongly to substantial 18th-century alterations, meaning what survives is a layered structure rather than a preserved 17th-century original. To the south-west, a large walled garden, roughly 50 metres by 76 metres, is enclosed by randomly coursed limestone rubble walls around two metres high, with an entrance gap of just under two and a half metres in the east wall.