It is recorded, it was real, and yet it has left no trace whatsoever above ground. The enclosure itself survives, as does part of the adjoining tower house beside it, but the house that once stood inside the bawn, a defended courtyard wall typically built to protect both a main residence and its outbuildings, has simply vanished. Its precise location within that enclosure remains unknown.

The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 is unusually direct on the matter. It records that in 1640 the land at Nickolstowne was owned by Richard Keatinge of Nickolstowne, described in the survey's blunt administrative shorthand as an Irish Papist, a designation routinely applied to Catholic landowners in the years immediately before the Cromwellian conquest reshaped ownership across the country. The survey notes that upon the lands stood a castle and the walls of a house within a bawn. That phrasing, the walls of a house, already suggests something partial or ruinous even at the time of recording, just over a decade after the 1640 baseline date. The site sits on the eastern edge of a limestone outcrop, with a sharp drop falling away to the east, and the remaining earthworks and stonework still occupy that same dramatic natural threshold.

What survives today is the bawn enclosure and part of the tower house, a type of fortified residential building common across Ireland from the late medieval period onward. The house that the Civil Survey placed inside the bawn has left nothing that field inspection has yet identified. It is one of those cases where the documentary record outpaces the physical one, a building that exists more fully in a mid-seventeenth-century land survey than in the ground itself.