At Clonea in County Waterford, a cluster of house foundations sits quietly inside a bawn, the walled enclosure that would once have served a tower house as its outer defensive yard. What makes the arrangement worth pausing over is the layering: medieval defensive architecture, a natural rock outcrop pressed into service as a building platform, and then, later, the ghost outlines of structures that are probably modern in origin, their purpose now unclear, their walls reduced to foundations.

The tower house itself is encircled by a fosse, a defensive ditch, roughly eight metres wide and about a metre deep, cut around the base of the rock outcrop on the south-east to west arc. Fosses of this kind were a common feature of tower house complexes in later medieval Ireland, designed to slow an approach and reinforce the sense of separation between the fortified residence and the surrounding landscape. The rock outcrop beneath the tower would have given the structure additional height and a degree of natural protection. Inside the bawn, the surviving foundations of the later houses add a quieter puzzle: whoever built or used them was working within the bones of an older fortified site, either repurposing what remained or simply finding a ready-made enclosure convenient.