By that point, nobody seems to have been entirely sure when it was established or precisely where its boundaries lay. What survives is a landscape feature that is easy to overlook: a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately 480 metres east to west and 640 metres north to south, with an irregular triangular extension pushing out from the northern sector. The field boundaries visible on that early map are still traceable on the ground today, possibly the original enclosing elements of a managed deer park.

Deer parks were a feature of medieval and early modern lordship across Ireland and Britain, enclosed tracts designed to hold fallow deer for hunting and to signal the wealth and authority of their owners. A reliable water source was a practical necessity, and a stream running roughly east to west through the southern portion of the rectangular area would have served that purpose here. The park is almost certainly connected to St. Johnstown Castle, which stands around 500 metres to the west of the park's probable south-western corner. The castle complex combines a medieval tower house, the kind of fortified residence common across Munster from the fifteenth century onward, with a later dwelling that Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, described simply as a "modern house" in the ownership of a James Millet. The pairing of an older defensive structure with a more comfortable residence beside it was a common pattern as the need for fortification gradually gave way to considerations of comfort and estate management.

What is quietly unusual here is the ambiguity the place carries. By the time the Ordnance Survey arrived with their instruments, the park was already old enough to be called old, yet its origins remain unresolved. The boundaries endure, the stream still runs, and the general shape of the enclosure can still be read in the field pattern, a faint outline of an estate practice that has otherwise left almost no documentary trace.