At the old glebe house in Swords, County Dublin, that expectation was confounded quite literally: during renovations in the late 1990s, a number of burials were uncovered beneath the structure, and these pre-date the building itself, meaning the dead had been there long before the first vicar moved in.

The house dates to around 1675, built as a vicarage on glebe land, which is property historically set aside by the Church of Ireland for the use and income of a local clergyman. The main block is a detached, three-bay, two-storey dwelling, with a projecting two-bay, two-storey block attached to its right-hand side. To the left, a gable-fronted wing survives, thought possibly to have served as a private chapel, though its original function has not been confirmed with certainty. The building was added to considerably over subsequent centuries: a three-bay, single-storey return with a half-dormer attic was appended to the rear around 1750, and a five-bay, two-storey coach house followed around 1875. By 1997, when extensive renovation brought the structure into residential use as apartments, the building had accumulated layers from at least four distinct phases of construction. The burials recovered during that work are catalogued separately in the archaeological record and point to earlier activity on the site, the precise nature of which remains unclear from the available evidence.

The building is recorded on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage under registration number 11343004, which is publicly searchable at buildingsofireland.ie and provides additional architectural detail. Swords itself is a busy north County Dublin town, and the glebe house sits within the older core of the settlement near the ecclesiastical remains that defined the area for centuries. The exterior, including the varied rooflines and the projecting wings that betray its long building history, is visible from the street, though the interior is now private residential accommodation. Those with an eye for the accumulated geometry of old buildings, the way later additions angle away from an earlier core, will find the composition worth a slow look.