The castle once commanded this natural basin, sheltered by ridges to the east, southeast, west and northwest, but today only local memory and old maps preserve its existence. The Ordnance Survey recorded it as ‘Castle (in Ruins)’ in both 1838 and 1915, with the 1914 edition showing the ghost of its final form; a rectangular building running east to west, incorporated into a longer wall stretching north to south.

The castle’s disappearance tells a particularly Irish story of pragmatic recycling and gradual erasure. For generations, local farmers helped themselves to the dressed stones, incorporating them into field walls and farm buildings throughout the surrounding countryside. By the 1980s, only a fragment of one wall remained standing, and even this last vestige was cleared away and unceremoniously buried. Those who remember the final demolition recall a thoroughly ruinous structure that had long ceased to serve any purpose beyond supplying building material.

Local tradition maintains that the Blakes, one of Galway’s famous merchant families, once held the castle. This connection, if true, would place Coolcon within the complex web of tower houses and fortified dwellings that these Norman-descended families built throughout Connacht from the late medieval period onwards. Today, visitors searching for the castle will find only an unremarkable patch of pasture, though the very ordinariness of the scene perhaps makes it all the more poignant; a reminder of how completely time and practicality can erase even substantial stone buildings from the landscape.