What remains today is a modest rectangular tower, roughly 10 metres by 7 metres, built from random rubble stone with walls over a metre thick. Though only one storey now survives to a height of about 4 metres, with the northeast wall having long since collapsed, the structure still bears witness to centuries of Irish history. Visitors can enter through a pointed doorway in the southwest wall, its arch carefully constructed from thin stone slabs, whilst broken openings in the other walls hint at former windows and doorways now lost to time.

The castle’s history is intriguingly incomplete. It doesn’t appear on the 1657 Down Survey map, yet by 1837 the Ordnance Survey clearly shows this tower as part of a larger L-shaped complex called ‘Corcloon House’. The main house had vanished by 1910, leaving no trace above ground today, though the castle tower endures. The land itself tells a tale of Ireland’s turbulent past; in 1640, it belonged to William Bermingham, identified as an Irish papist in contemporary records. Following the Confederate Wars that ravaged Ireland from 1641 to 1653, Bermingham’s estates were confiscated and granted to Nathaniel Micklethwaite, recorded as the Protestant owner by 1670.

This transfer of ownership from Catholic to Protestant hands exemplifies the massive redistribution of land that reshaped Irish society in the aftermath of the Confederate Wars. Today, the lonely tower at Corcloon stands as a tangible reminder of these upheavals; a fragment of a once larger estate that witnessed the dramatic changes in land ownership, religion, and power that defined 17th-century Ireland.