The castle appears on the 1657 Down Survey map of Fore Barony, where it’s recorded as belonging to Richard Dease, an Irish Catholic landowner who held the property in 1641. Despite this documented existence, no visible trace of the medieval structure survives today, and even its precise location remains a matter of educated guesswork. The current Turbotstown House, built around 1810, sits remarkably close to where the castle appears on the old survey maps, suggesting it may have been constructed directly atop the medieval foundations or very near to them.

The Georgian country house that now dominates the site is an elegant three-bay, two-storey building featuring a distinctive Greek Ionic entrance porch with cut limestone columns. According to the current owner, parts of the yard may well overlay an earlier dwelling, possibly incorporating elements of the lost castle itself. The most intriguing remnants of the past are two large limestone heads set high in the wall of the outbuildings northwest of the main house. Positioned above doorways, these sharply carved, seemingly genderless faces appear to date from the 19th century rather than the medieval period, adding another layer to the site’s architectural mystery.

The complete disappearance of Turbotstown Castle from the physical and cartographic record is particularly striking; it doesn’t appear on any edition of the Ordnance Survey 6-inch maps, suggesting it had already vanished or been completely subsumed by the time systematic mapping began in Ireland. This leaves historians and archaeologists to piece together its story from documentary evidence alone, a reminder that many of Ireland’s medieval structures have left only the faintest whispers of their existence in terriers, surveys, and the occasional curious architectural fragment embedded in later buildings.