What is now a private residence was once catalogued as a school, yet the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels it something else entirely: 'Charter Ho.', shorthand for Charter House, or Charter School. That small discrepancy in nomenclature points to a very particular kind of institution, one with a history that sits uncomfortably in the Irish record.

Charter Schools were establishments founded under the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland, a body chartered in 1733. Their purpose was explicitly to provide an English Protestant education to children from Catholic and poor backgrounds, and they were controversial from the outset, attracting criticism for the conditions children endured and the coercive intent behind them. By the nineteenth century, when this building appears on the map with that label, the Charter School system was in sharp decline, and many of its properties had passed into other uses or been absorbed into newer educational arrangements. The building itself is H-shaped in plan, a relatively unusual form, with a seven-bay front elevation in which the three central bays are deeply recessed, creating a kind of shallow courtyard effect at the entrance. A hipped roof sits above, with chimneys placed off-centre, and the side elevations run two bays deep. The doors and windows have been modernised, and a porch now obscures what was once a central ground-floor window flanked by two doorways, an arrangement that may originally have separated different categories of pupil or function within the building.