When surveyors visited in the 1650s, they recorded ‘an old broken stump of a Castle with an old broken Bawne’ in the possession of Patrick Nettervill, whose father held the lease from the Crown. The site, also known historically as Athforth or Athfath, had been considerably more substantial in the 16th century when it boasted a fortified castle with a hall, 51 acres of land and a dozen cottages, leased to the Countess of Ormond in 1541 for £4 annually.

Today, what remains of the castle sits on a gentle rise about six metres south of Baptistgrange church, surrounded by pasture and tillage fields with earthworks visible to the east and northeast. The surviving structure consists mainly of a north to south limestone rubble wall, roughly coursed and averaging less than a metre in height. The western face remains intact whilst the eastern side has collapsed outward. About three and a half metres west stands another limestone wall fragment, rising to nearly two metres and topped with modern stonework that now serves as a revetment for built up earth. A substantial chunk of collapsed masonry, measuring four metres long and over a metre high, lies toppled seven metres east of the standing wall.

When Ordnance Survey officers documented the site in the 19th century, they found considerably more standing; a stone arch running north to south measuring five metres long by three metres wide and over two and a half metres high, though broken at the southwest corner. They also recorded a portion of the castle’s east wall standing six metres high at the southeast angle, with a thickness of nearly one and a half metres. Time and weather have clearly taken their toll since then, reducing this once proud fortification to scattered fragments that hint at its former significance in the medieval landscape of Tipperary.