Built with roughly coursed rubble and featuring well-cut corner stones, the tower measures 9.4 metres north to south and 10.9 metres east to west, with walls nearly two metres thick. Its most distinctive feature is the pronounced base batter; a sloping foundation that extends four metres up the walls, adding both stability and an imposing silhouette to the structure. Though now harled in render with its angles picked out in fine plaster, the tower’s medieval bones remain clearly visible beneath its later modifications.

The Civil Survey of 1654-56 provides a fascinating snapshot of the castle in the mid-17th century, describing it as ‘lately repaired at ye States charge’ and noting it stood within a bawn (fortified enclosure) alongside two thatched houses. The property then belonged to James Tobyn of Killaghy, identified as an ‘Irish Papist’, though following the 1641 Rising, Commonwealth troops seized and garrisoned the tower. Today, no trace remains of the bawn or houses mentioned in the survey, but an 18th-century house, later remodelled in the Victorian era, has been built directly against the tower’s western face, creating an unusual architectural marriage of medieval fortress and Georgian domestic comfort.

The tower’s interior layout follows the typical Irish tower house pattern, with a ground floor entrance lobby leading to what was likely a guardroom to the south and a spiral stair chamber to the north. The stair, rising in the northwest corner and topped by a cap house at parapet level, would have provided access to the upper floors, each containing a main chamber with various refinements. The first floor boasts a large segmental-headed fireplace with voussoirs set on edge, whilst the upper levels feature increasingly sophisticated window arrangements, culminating in elegant two-light ogee-headed windows at the fourth floor. Gun loops at the third floor corners and various mural chambers throughout speak to both the defensive and domestic functions of this remarkable survivor of Ireland’s turbulent past.