That single word raises more questions than it answers, and those questions have not been fully resolved since.

The house itself presents as an eighteenth-century structure, though the fabric may be older in places. Its north-facing entrance front runs to six bays across a single storey, with a two-storey gabled projection jutting out at an obtuse angle from the east end, a slightly irregular arrangement that gives the building an unhurried, accumulated quality rather than the clean symmetry of formal Georgian design. What surrounds it is at least as interesting as the house itself. To the east lies a walled garden containing bee boles, small recesses built into a wall to shelter straw bee skeps, the predecessor of the modern hive, and a practical feature associated with monastic and estate gardens alike. To the north there is an ice house, a pre-refrigeration structure, typically a brick-lined underground vault, used to store winter ice through the warmer months. A large covered well, which local tradition holds to be medieval, sits to the east in the garden of a neighbouring bungalow. Whether that well is connected to the 'Monastery' and whatever community once occupied the site is unclear. Local accounts suggest a monastic community did live here at some point, but there is genuine uncertainty about when, whether in the medieval period or in more recent centuries when religious communities were re-established in parts of rural Ireland following the relaxation of penal restrictions. The name on the map may preserve a memory, or it may be recording something still living in 1846. No one, it seems, is entirely sure.