Poynstown at the time was owned by Pierce Cantwell, His brother John was Abbot of Holycross and helped to organise the Confederation of Kilkenny, an alliance of Old English and Gaelic Ireland that shared a common Roman Catholic religion.  The Confederation controlled much of Ireland for some years during the period of the English Civil War and before the arrival of Cromwell’s army.  Pierce's brother was a close friend of Viscount Mountgarret who became president of the Confederation in November 1642.  Mountgarret forbade by proclaimation attacking anti-rebellion families or their property.  John Cantwell repeatedly broke this law so a £500 fine was levied against him.  All attempts to control him seem to have failed and Mountgarret was forced to shoot Cantwell after he was involved in pillaging Kilkenny city in 1641.

 The rebellion failed and the Cromwellians ran a policy of removing the Irish from positions of power and ownership.  Many of the rebellious or Catholic landowning families in the area were tried for treason and rebellion, those Catholics found innocent were deprived of their existing lands but given some land west of the Shannon, the rest were stripped of everything.  On the 22nd. May 1656 Pierce Cantwell was found innocent and was given 266acres in Connaught.

 A lease dated the 4th. January 1665 gave John Bird, an ex-Cromwellian trooper, Poynstown for 21 years.  The rent for the first 16 years was £40, to be paid half. yearly and for the last 5 years it was £53, paid quarterly.  He planned to build a great house, with a hundred  yard long front, within two years.  To build his house he was given permission to knock the castle which stood where Morris's house now stands.  Bird also rented 236 acres of land from Pierce Croake in Mellisson.  The Cookes moved into Poynstown after Bird, they must have been of some importance as they had a royal licence to enclose a deerpark, the wall of which still stand.  In the 1850's the ‘Griffith Valuations’ show one Fennell Cooke esq. as owning 595 acres in Poynstown, (the total area of the townsland in just 740 acres), and 296 acres in Mellisson.

 Cooke's house in Poynstown went to a Catholic named Morris.  Morris knocked the big house and fixed up the dairy as a dwelling as insurance that the property would not be confiscated.  The present house was built in 1925.  The man who purchased and knocked the great house was the great-great grandfather of the present Jimmy Morris.

 In March of 1678 a bizarre series of celestial apparitions of ships and objects were reported as having been witnessed in Poynstown by usually reliable witnesses.  The reports of the apparitions had wide currency and even reached the newspapers in England.  No further reports of the visions of sea battles, ships, chariots, castles and ghostly arms all in the skies were forthcoming after the date.