The settlement sits roughly three hundred metres south-west of the former Carrigeen Hall, unremarkable ground to a passing eye, but the kind of place that repays attention once you know what it once was.

The site owes its documentary existence to a map produced in 1598 by or for Sir Walter Ralegh, covering his Mogeely estate in east Cork. On that map, the settlement is labelled 'The Banckes' and depicted with three or four houses described as English in type, accompanied by a curvilinear boundary to the east and a gateway opening onto a lane leading to the road. The timing is significant: 1598 falls within the period of the Munster Plantation, the Elizabethan scheme to colonise confiscated lands in the province with English settlers following the Desmond Rebellions. Excavations carried out in 1992 by Franc Myles, working under Dr Eric Klingelhofer, confirmed that something was indeed there. A ditch about one and a half metres wide and half a metre deep was found curving to the north and north-east on the eastern side of the site, broadly consistent with the boundary shown on the Ralegh map. A second trench to the west revealed a rectangular structure roughly eleven metres long on its north-west to south-east axis, its walls surviving only as robber trenches, the stonework long since removed and reused elsewhere. Inside, fine cobbling was preserved, divided into two rooms by a cross-wall with a narrow gap of about sixty centimetres. A slot running through the cobbling of the north-west room may have held a wall plate for a timber partition, suggesting a structure that mixed stone and wood construction. Three shallow pits to the south of the slot were too insubstantial to have held upright posts. No datable finds came out of any of this, but the architectural character of the remains is considered consistent with the Plantation period, placing the settlement's probable heyday in the closing decades of the sixteenth century or the early seventeenth.