This fortified house, built around the turn of the 17th century, was constructed during a period when Irish landowners were transitioning from purely defensive castle structures to more comfortable, though still fortified, domestic residences. The site commands extensive views across the surrounding landscape, its rocky foundation having been deliberately scarped around the edges to enhance its defensive capabilities.

The complex originally consisted of an L-shaped fortified house measuring approximately 40 by 26 metres, surrounded by a bawn wall; a defensive perimeter typical of plantation era strongholds. Today, only the northern half of the main building survives, along with the grass-covered foundations of the bawn wall, which still rise to about three-quarters of a metre in height. The entrance to the compound was located in the southeast corner, protected by a modest gatehouse whose footings remain visible. The surviving structure reveals sophisticated architectural evolution: it began as an L-plan building with two rooms per floor, then was converted to a Z-plan layout through the addition of a narrow, gable-ended extension on the northwest corner, complete with its own chimney stack.

The remaining walls, built from roughly coursed limestone rubble with a distinctive base batter, contain intriguing architectural details that speak to the building’s former grandeur. Two small tower chambers in the northwest and northeast corners housed staircases leading to upper floor chambers, whilst the main floors were supported by wooden beams. The stonework shows evidence of skilled craftsmanship, with fine punch dressing arranged diagonally within punched borders, and several doorways featuring two-centred pointed arches. By 1654, during Cromwell’s Civil Survey of Ireland, the castle was already described as ‘a stumpe of an old castle without repayre’, suggesting it had fallen into ruin relatively quickly, possibly during the upheavals of the 1640s when John Morres was recorded as its proprietor.