Yet the modest structure at Cahereamore carries within it the bones of something considerably older, and connects a quiet Clare hillside to one of the most consequential family networks in early modern Ireland.

The house is marked as Wingfield Lodge on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1840 and 1916, and the name points directly to its history. The property was associated with the Wingfield family, who held the title Dukes of Suffolk. The genealogical thread that links this place to the wider Irish landscape begins with Honora O'Brien, born in 1559, daughter of Teige O'Brien of Smithfield Castle. Her marriage to Richard Wingfield produced a son, Sir Edward Wingfield, who became a progenitor of the Lords Powerscourt of County Wicklow, a title that would become one of the more prominent Anglo-Irish peerages. One of Honora and Richard's daughters married Donogh O'Brien of Lemenagh, connecting the family by marriage to another significant Clare dynasty. The current building is a nineteenth-century construction, gable-ended with a single storey, but a two-storey, one-bay gable-ended return is thought to preserve fabric from a seventeenth-century house that preceded it on the same site, making the present structure a layering of two distinct periods rather than a single build.

The lodge sits within a tree-lined farmyard surrounded by pasture, and its position on the ridge gives it uninterrupted views in all directions, a quality that would have been as practical in the seventeenth century as it is atmospheric now.