The castle’s earliest documented appearance dates to the Down Survey of 1656-8, where it was depicted as a roofless gabled house on the barony map of Ardee parish. This survey, commissioned by Oliver Cromwell to map confiscated lands across Ireland, provides one of the few surviving visual records of the building during the tumultuous 17th century.

The castle’s presence fluctuated through historical records over the following centuries. Taylor and Skinner’s 1777 map clearly marked a castle at this location, yet curiously, their 1778 edition omitted it entirely; a cartographic mystery that raises questions about whether the structure had already begun its decline or if this was simply an oversight. By the 19th century, the Ordnance Survey maps of 1835 and 1907 acknowledged only the ghost of what once was, marking it definitively as the “site of a castle” rather than an active structure.

Today, the location tells a different story altogether. Where stone walls once stood, quarrying operations have transformed the landscape entirely, leaving no visible traces of the castle at ground level. This transformation from medieval stronghold to industrial extraction site reflects a common fate for many of Ireland’s lesser-known castles, where practical needs of later generations often overwrote the physical remnants of earlier times. The site remains a testament to how quickly even substantial structures can vanish from the landscape, surviving only in maps and historical records.