The site at Grove clusters around a motte, a raised earthen mound of the kind thrown up by the Normans as a foundation for a timber castle, along with a small moated site and a large enclosure. A meandering stream that once ran to the north of these earthworks has since been straightened, and the older course is visible only on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839. Quarrying activity, hedgerows, and forestry to the south have further complicated the picture, leaving a landscape that holds considerable archaeology without yielding it easily.

The manor to which all of this belongs was Tullaghanbrogue, and its story is one of long Anglo-Norman tenure followed by abrupt Cromwellian erasure. The historian G.H. Orpen, writing in 1909, recorded that William de St. Leger held the manor and that the St. Leger family remained connected with it until the Cromwellian period. By 1607 an inquisition at Thomastown confirmed that Edmund Sentleger was in legal possession of the manor and town of Tullaghanbrogue, and a further inquisition in 1626 to 1627 reaffirmed the same. Then came the confiscations of 1653, and the St. Leger estate was forfeited. In 1666 the land was granted to a Joseph Cuffe, with the notable instruction that it be called and known for ever by the name of Cuffe's Grove, which is why the place carries the name Grove today. The medieval parish church of Tullaghanbrogue still stands about 200 metres to the west. Across the road from it, the historian William Carrigan noted in 1905 the traces of foundations near a well that had possibly once served as a holy well, along with a slight mound said locally to mark the site of an ancient monastery; the area lying east of this was known as the glebe, the land traditionally set aside for a parish clergyman. That ground to the south of the road has since been heavily disturbed by forestry, cleared, and replanted, and nothing survives above ground there now.