The site centres around a five-storey tower house that still stands to its full height, tucked into the southeast corner of a large rectangular bawn that now functions as a working farmyard. The tower house, measuring 13 metres north to south and 9.5 metres east to west, showcases classic defensive architecture with its pointed arch doorways, gun loops, and a distinctive fore-building that provided protected access to both ground and first floor entrances. Inside, the tower reveals sophisticated medieval living arrangements: vaulted chambers with ogee-headed windows, stone seats, garderobes, and a fireplace on the third floor. A complex internal stairway system, beginning as a straight flight before transforming into a spiral stair, connects all levels up to the wall walk, where fragments of the original stepped battlements still crown the north and west walls.

The bawn itself forms a substantial enclosure, roughly 65 metres northwest to southeast and 50 metres southwest to northeast, with additional defensive and domestic structures integrated into its walls. At the northeast corner stands a three-storey gabled tower with a pointed wicker-centred vault over its first floor, though much modified and filled with debris from centuries of use. Along the south wall, the remains of a large seventeenth-century range stretch for nearly 48 metres, featuring three massive chimney stacks atop subsidiary gables, multiple fireplaces with domed bread ovens, and blocked windows with mullion and transom divisions; clear evidence of its transformation during the Earl of Cork’s ownership after he acquired the property in the 1600s.

The castle’s turbulent history reflects the broader conflicts of medieval and early modern Ireland; it was attacked and taken by Sir Henry Sidney in both 1569 and 1575 during the Desmond Rebellions. After passing to Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, in the seventeenth century, it was restored and inhabited by his son, the Earl of Orrery, until his death in 1679. The Earls of Shannon later built a new house immediately to the west in the early eighteenth century, at which point the medieval bawn was transformed into a coach and farm yard, a function it continues to serve today. The nineteenth-century rounded archway in the north wall and the castellations along various sections of the bawn walls reflect these later adaptations, creating a fascinating palimpsest of Irish architectural history from the medieval period through to modern farming use.