A short stretch of wall-footing, roughly two metres long, just over a metre thick, and barely twenty centimetres above the ground, extends outward from the tower's north-east angle. It is not much to look at, but the puzzle it poses is genuine: nobody is entirely certain what it once was.

Two interpretations have been put forward, and the evidence supports either. The footing may be the remnant of a two-storey house that was built directly against the outer face of the tower's eastern wall, effectively leaning into it for support. This was not an unusual arrangement in late medieval and early modern Ireland, where domestic buildings were sometimes added to tower houses as the need for more comfortable living space grew. What lends weight to this reading is the presence of horizontal scar lines on the tower wall itself, faint markings that could indicate where the floors of a first and second storey once met the masonry. Alternatively, the footing may belong to a bawn wall, the kind of defensive enclosure, typically a high stone or earthen barrier surrounding a tower house and its yard, that was common across Ireland during the same period. A survey carried out in 1944 and a study published by English in 1971 both noted the feature without resolving the ambiguity.

The site sits in a quiet part of Longford, and the tower house to which these fragments belong is a separately recorded monument. What remains of the possible house or bawn is slight, the kind of ruin that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance, and the unresolved nature of the identification is itself part of what makes it worth attention.