First recorded around 1320 as “Wallygard”, the castle passed through generations of the Burke family who held it for over a century. The 1540 rental records show it as “Baile na ceeard”, the estate of Maoilre Burke, and by 1583 it was firmly established as Ballynogerd Castle under W. Bourke’s ownership. His son Edmond later entailed it to his sons Walter and John in 1587, beginning a complex chain of inheritance that would see the property change hands multiple times through marriage, transplantation, and political upheaval.

The castle gained a touch of romantic notoriety in 1680 when antiquarian Thomas Dineley sketched the four-storey peel tower and recorded a dramatic tale of a Burke daughter who leapt from a window 16 yards high to escape a forced marriage. In a twist worthy of a ballad, she later married the very man she’d fled from and, according to Dineley, “lived happily.” By this time, the castle had passed from the Burkes, who were affected by the Cromwellian transplantations of 1653, to John Croker, a Justice of the Peace. The 1654-56 Civil Survey provides a glimpse of the castle at its height, describing not just the castle and bawn, but also two stone houses and a mill, all under the ownership of Theobald Borke, identified as “an Irish Papist.”

Today, the site tells a story of both grandeur and decay. The main house, built in 1774, stands roofless and ruined; a detached five-bay, two-storey country house over a basement with various extensions that once marked it as a substantial residence. The remains of two-storey outbuildings with rubble limestone walls and segmental-headed arches with red brick voussoirs can still be seen to the rear, along with traces of a walled garden with distinctive curved corner walls. These ruins, documented by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, serve as tangible reminders of the centuries of habitation, conflict, and daily life that unfolded at Ballynagarde.