This area, known during the medieval period as Ballymacelligott East and West, takes its name from the MacElligots, a prominent family who once held considerable power in these parts. According to a manuscript preserved in Trinity College Dublin, the MacElligots were descendants of the MacClowds from the Isle of Skye in Scotland, who arrived in Ireland with Galfridus de Marisco, Justice of Ireland, and accumulated substantial landholdings throughout the region.

The castle appears on the seventeenth century Down Survey map of Trughanacmy barony, where it’s depicted as a tower house alongside a church, both testament to the family’s wealth and influence. By 1841, when John O’Donovan surveyed the area for the Ordnance Survey, the castle had already fallen into ruin; he recorded finding only traces of foundations and a portion of one wall at the southeast corner, measuring thirty feet long and about twelve feet high. The site was marked on the 1841 OS six inch map with a dotted outline, indicating where the rectangular structure once stood.

Today, visitors to the site will find extensive earthworks stretching approximately 65 metres north to south, with some stone visible amongst the grassy mounds that hint at the castle’s former foundations. While the physical structure has largely disappeared, these subtle traces in the landscape, still faintly visible on modern satellite imagery, mark the spot where the MacElligots once ruled their domain. The castle’s story forms part of the complex tapestry of Anglo Norman and Gaelic settlement in medieval Kerry, where Scottish families could establish themselves as Irish lords, leaving their mark on both the landscape and local placenames for centuries to come.