It has been formally recorded as a monument, assigned a place in the official inventory of Ireland's built heritage, and yet the most basic question about it, when it was built, remains unanswered. That ambiguity is itself telling. Mayo is a county where the layers of habitation run deep and the documentary record thins quickly once you move away from estate papers and church registers. A structure that resists dating could be medieval, early modern, or something in between, its origins lost to the particular silence that tends to settle over vernacular buildings that were never grand enough to attract a surveyor or significant enough to appear in a landlord's account book.

Doonadoba is a small rural townland, and the classification of this structure simply as a house, without further qualification, suggests something domestic and unelaborated rather than a tower house or fortified residence. In parts of the west of Ireland, houses of indeterminate date are often the remnants of pre-Famine settlement patterns, clusters of low stone buildings whose occupants vanished during the catastrophe of the 1840s and whose construction predates any reliable local record-keeping. Without further detail it is impossible to say whether this particular structure fits that pattern, but the designation places it in a long tradition of ordinary habitation in a landscape where ordinary habitation has a complicated and often painful history.