What makes the site quietly strange is precisely this uncertainty: the structure was deliberately commissioned, its specifications written into a tenancy agreement, yet no trace of it can now be clearly identified above ground.

The story begins in 1663, when the Kilcooley estate papers record John Bird as the principal tenant of Poyntstown. The terms of his tenancy were unusually specific. Bird was required to demolish the existing castle on the site and, within two years, to replace it with a house of stone and lime, slate-roofed and thirty feet long, roughly nine metres. He was also obliged to plant an orchard and garden. It is a rare glimpse into the practical mechanics of post-Cromwellian resettlement in Ireland, when landlords were actively reshaping the landscape, clearing out older defensive structures and replacing them with domestic buildings that signalled a new kind of ordered, agricultural permanence. The ruins visible today, a farmhouse and outhouses dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, sit on the slight rise where Bird's house was almost certainly built. The walled enclosure to the east of the farmyard may even preserve the outline of that original orchard, now well over three hundred years old. The site sits at the foothills of the Slieveardagh hills, on poorly drained grassland, with a deer park recorded about three hundred metres to the east, suggesting that in its heyday this was a property of some local consequence.