The history Michael gives of the site on which Mount Saint Joseph Monastery was built is flawed. Writes Father Lawrence Walsh, OCSO, who also cites Margaret MacCurtain’s Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Dublin, 1972): “The years of the Commonwealth had seen an immense upheaval in land ownership in Ireland, as Cromwellian soldiers and adventurers were handed out tracts of land while about 44,000 Irish were transported to Connaught in 1654 to make room for them.”

Fr. Walsh explains that the title to the lands still known as Ballyskenagh in Richard Heaton's lifetime, and later as Mount Heaton, was not finally secured from the Crown by Richard himself despite his many attempts, but only by his first son, Edward, in 1669, after Richard’s and his wife’s deaths.

If there is any historical truth to Brother Declan’s tale of the hunting lodge ringing with cries of “Tallyho” at drinking parties attended by redcoated Orangemen, it is unlikely to derive from the life of Richard Heaton, a clergyman and pioneering botanist known for devotion to his family, for whose sake he tried to secure the O’Carroll lands. Perhaps the tale arose from local gossip about Richard's third son Francis, who was, as Father Walsh recounts, the eventual heir to the Heaton estate. A young man who “seems to have been a wild character in his youth,” Edward renamed Ballyskenagh Mount Heaton, but then, having rebuilt the mansion that later became the Monastery guesthouse, he let the property run into debt and mortgages (Fr. Walsh's Richard Heaton page 97).