Tucked into the southern wall of a house on the floodplain of the River Suir, a small limestone datestone carries an inscription that most passers-by would never notice. The stone, measuring just 34 centimetres tall and 27 centimetres wide, reads 'IFE ANNO DOMINI 1676', the initials standing for Ian Francis Everard. It is an easy thing to overlook, a recycled piece of worked limestone absorbed into later domestic masonry, yet it quietly preserves a name and a precise year from the latter half of the seventeenth century.

The Everard family were an Old English Catholic dynasty with deep roots in Munster, and the placing of an initialled datestone on a building was a common way for landowners of the period to assert ownership and mark construction or renovation. The year 1676 falls in the reign of Charles II, a period of cautious Catholic recovery after the upheavals of the Cromwellian settlement, when families like the Everards were attempting to re-establish their presence on the land. The stone now sits roughly thirty metres north-northeast of a tower house, the kind of fortified residence, typically a tall narrow structure of several storeys, that the Anglo-Norman and Old English gentry of Ireland built and occupied from the medieval period onward. Whether the datestone originally belonged to that tower house or to a distinct building on the same landholding is not clear, but the two structures share the same slight rise above the surrounding floodplain.