The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records it plainly and vividly: 'a faire house wherein the Lady of Thurles liveth with a castle and severall Turrets upon the Bawne.' That single line conjures a compound of some consequence, a domestic arrangement that combined a comfortable house with the defensive apparatus of an earlier age.

The seventeenth-century house appears to have been built against the western face of an existing tower house, one of those tall, thick-walled fortified residences common across late medieval Ireland, and tie stones where a structure was attached to it still survive in the masonry. The bawn, a walled enclosure typically used to protect livestock and provide a defensive perimeter around a tower house or fortified dwelling, may well predate the house itself, having been built alongside the tower house and then adapted when the later residence was added. What remains of it is fragmentary: a section of bawn wall near the south-western angle of the tower house, retaining traces of a wall-walk along its upper course, and a further portion to the north carrying the remains of a bartizan, a small overhanging corner turret that would have allowed defenders to observe the base of the walls below. The northern wall of the bawn was levelled in recent years, reducing what was already a partial survival to something more scattered still.

The site sits behind the present streetscape rather than on it, which accounts for both its obscurity and the fact that anything survives at all. Visitors to Liberty Square who know to look westward, past the building lines, may catch sight of the older stonework that the survey's anonymous compilers once thought worth recording in such precise and almost affectionate terms.