Also known as Bishop’s Court, this tower house castle first appeared on the Down Survey map of Killare parish, where it stood on lands belonging to the Bishop of Meath. The survey’s terrier noted that castles stood on several townlands in the area, including Clare, Dooneild, Rathskeagh, Killinbrack, Bishopsland and Ballikenny; a testament to the defensive needs of the region during earlier centuries.

By 1837, the Ordnance Survey depicted the castle as an L-shaped structure annotated as ‘in ruins’, with gardens to the south and two long buildings to the southeast. These outbuildings had vanished by the time of the 1913 revision, when the map simply marked it as ‘Site of’, suggesting the castle’s remains were already disappearing. When archaeological surveyors visited in 1977, they found no visible surface remains at all, though the site’s footprint could still be traced through other means.

Local memory, however, preserves details that maps cannot capture. According to residents, the castle site once consisted of a large subrectangular area of approximately three acres, enclosed by a substantial bank with an outer fosse on the north, east and west sides. The bank, which reached heights of up to 10 feet, featured external stone facing, whilst the southern boundary consisted of a wide bank set atop a stone-faced embankment. This entire defensive enclosure, along with whatever remained of the castle’s interior structures, was reportedly levelled in the early 1950s, completing the transformation of a medieval stronghold into unremarkable farmland.