Where local tradition once placed the late medieval seat of the Mortimer family, a surveyor found only the ruined shells of what appeared to be eighteenth-century outhouses, and recorded bluntly that there was no archaeological significance to what remained. It is a particular kind of historical disappearance: not dramatic destruction, but a slow subsidence into the ground, leaving a name on an old map and a story that outlasted the stones.

The site sits on the shores of Lough Derravaragh in County Westmeath, roughly fifty metres east of the lake and eighty metres north-north-west of Mortimer's Castle, a separate structure that still registers as a distinct monument in its own right. The Mortimer connection is carried by local tradition rather than documentary record, but the family were a significant Anglo-Norman presence in the Irish midlands during the later medieval period, and the clustering of 'Old Court' beside an identifiable castle bearing the same name suggests at least a plausible association. 'Old Court' as a place-name often signals a site of former administrative or seigneurial importance, a residence or enclosure that held some local authority before falling out of use. Here, whatever that original structure was, it had already been replaced or forgotten by the time the outhouses were built, and those too are now largely gone.