When the floor was pulled up in the northern room off the kitchen, it revealed a low stone chamber partly sunk into the ground, its walls over a metre thick, a blocked window in the north wall, and a stone ledge running along the west side. In the floor of that chamber sits a small square shaft, carefully lined with dry stone, probably a latrine shaft that once vented to the outside. The farmhouse, in other words, is a shell built over a shell, and the shell beneath it is still largely intact.

The earliest reference to the site is to a tower house or fortified house thought to have been built by Teige Oge O'Doyne around 1551. By the seventeenth century a more substantial house and bawn stood here on slightly elevated ground close to the east bank of the Glenlahan river. A bawn, in the context of Irish fortified architecture, was an enclosing defensive wall, often with flanking towers, built around a house to protect it and its inhabitants. The western wall of that bawn still survives, with three simple splayed gun-loops and the remains of an angle tower at its northern end. The bridge crossing the river to give access to the site is thought to be early seventeenth century and contemporary with the house. When the farmhouse was constructed in the nineteenth century, the basement of that seventeenth-century building was filled in to form a foundation, and the older structure was simply built over rather than cleared away. The exposed chamber is not a true basement but resembles the ground floors documented in other fortified houses of the same period, and blocked windows in the east wall of the farmhouse kitchen suggest the standing building may incorporate parts of the earlier fabric as well. The seventeenth-century ground floor is presumed to continue southward beneath the farmhouse floor that remains in place.