In October 1810 Beaufort notes: ‘This house is nearly a ruin now — the offices all destroyed, the lawn and shrubberies all defaced and the garden waste, the house and demesne having been given up 9 or 10 years ago to his eldest son Lt. Colonel [John] Godfrey of the Kerry militia [later 2nd Bart.] upon his marriage to Miss Cromie [daughter of John Cromie of Cormone, Co. Antrim]; and the Colonel being chiefly with his regiment while Sir [William] G[odfrey] lives at an indifferent farm house two miles off with a kept woman. The Village exhibits the same symptoms of decay as the Landlord's Mansion’. Beaufort appends a very rough sketch plan of the house. The original Godfrey seat at Miltown was Bushfield, shown on an estate map of 1750 as a ‘long, low, two-storied farm house with dormer windows, three chimneys and, according to family tradition, a thatched roof’. A new house is thought to have been built on or near the site of the later family seat, Kilcoleman Abbey, c. 1774. Presumably this was the house to which Beaufort refers. (Information of Mrs. Valerie Bary).