The castle was home to Phelemy Brasleigh O’Doherty in 1600, during the turbulent final years before the Flight of the Earls. Following the Ulster Plantation in 1611, the property was granted to Arthur Chichester and subsequently leased to a Lieutenant Hoan, who was contractually obliged to rebuild the structure. Historical records from the period note that Hoan had already completed ‘a good bawne of lyme and stone’, referring to the defensive wall that would have enclosed the castle’s courtyard.

The tower house itself is a modest structure built from rubble masonry with dressed stone corners, all bound together with coarse mortar made from local sea sand. The walls show an unusual variation in thickness and feature a distinctive batter, or inward slope, up to the first floor level. What appears to be the original doorway survives as a rough opening in the eastern wall, with projecting stones at ground level marking where the splayed entrance would have stood. A gun loop positioned at first floor level in the eastern wall appears to be original to the building’s construction, suggesting the tower was designed with firearms in mind; a clear indicator of its 16th-century origins.

The castle’s defensive features extend beyond the main tower. About 42 metres south-southeast stands the remnant of a semi-circular tower, now reduced to a small western section barely 1.75 metres high. This fragment preserves one complete arrow loop and part of another, though early 19th-century sketches show it once stood two storeys tall with crenellations crowning its walls. This tower likely formed part of a larger bawn wall system, working in conjunction with another semi-circular tower at the keep’s southeast corner. Archaeological evidence suggests these additional fortifications were contemporary additions, probably constructed during Lieutenant Hoan’s rebuilding campaign in the early 1600s. The ruins of another structure, now just a pile of rubble 11 metres north of the keep, hint at the castle’s once more extensive layout.