The structure is of indeterminate date and uncertain function, but its position within an enclosure, alongside a church, a graveyard, and a high cross, places it squarely within the orbit of an early monastic settlement at Kilmacnevan. It is the kind of remnant that is easy to walk past without registering, a slight thickening in the grass, a few courses of stone at ankle height, and yet it is one piece of a much larger complex that has been accumulating history in this corner of Westmeath for well over a millennium.

The Kilmacnevan site was placed on the Register of Historic Monuments in 1989, though the monuments themselves belong to a far older story. The ecclesiastical enclosure, a roughly defined boundary that would have demarcated sacred or monastic ground in the early medieval period, contains within its south-west quadrant these wall footings of the possible house. Immediately to the north-north-east stand the church, the graveyard, and a high cross, the latter being a form of carved stone monument associated with Irish monasticism from roughly the eighth century onwards. The Schools' Collection of 1937 to 1939, a folklore archive compiled by schoolchildren across Ireland under the direction of the Irish Folklore Commission, recorded a local memory of the place that is worth pausing over. Children in the area noted that there had once been a town where the graveyard now lies, and that a monastery had stood within it, with ruins still visible in one corner. That oral tradition, gathered in the late 1930s, was describing something that archaeology has since confirmed in outline, a settled, bounded community of some complexity, reduced over centuries to foundations and a few upstanding stones.