Historic maps from the Down Survey of 1656-8 show what was once an impressive castle here in Rathmoline parish, within the barony of Moyfenrah. The surveyors depicted it as an elaborate structure with two three-storey towers connected by a central wing, suggesting this was no ordinary fortification but rather a sophisticated residence befitting its wealthy owner.

The castle belonged to Dr. Bramhall, who served as the Protestant Bishop of Derry and was later marked as a ‘Protestant Delinquent’ in the Civil Survey records of 1654-6. His holdings were substantial; he owned 500 acres at Castletown including the castle itself, and remarkably controlled nearly all the land in the entire parish save for about 800 acres. The architectural style shown in the Down Survey drawings suggests the building was likely a fashionable seventeenth-century house rather than a medieval fortress, reflecting the period’s shift towards more comfortable domestic architecture amongst the landed gentry.

Today, little remains of this once-grand structure. The castle that was so carefully recorded in the 1650s had already disappeared by the time of the Ordnance Survey’s first detailed mapping of Ireland in the nineteenth century, though a manuscript map in the National Library of Ireland marks it as a ruin. What survives now are merely two walls built against a rock outcrop, and even these are probably connected to later quarrying activities and a lime kiln that operated in the area rather than the original castle. The site stands as a reminder of how dramatically Ireland’s landscape and power structures changed through the turbulent centuries following the Cromwellian conquest.