Where medieval stone walls once stood, an oil refinery now dominates the entire area, leaving no visible trace of the castle that the Ordnance Survey carefully mapped in the early 20th century. The only glimpse into what once existed here comes from an intriguing late 18th-century oil painting hanging in the refinery’s boardroom, which depicts a tall tower house with a lower, wider building immediately to its west, all set within the walled gardens of Corkbeg House.

The castle’s history stretches back to the late medieval period, when it served as a stronghold for the De Caunton, or Condon, family. Local antiquarian John Windele recorded that the castle was built in 1396, though architectural evidence suggests the tower house itself may date from a later period, as was common when earlier fortifications were upgraded or rebuilt. The structure survived for centuries before meeting its demise in 1915, when one side collapsed dramatically, revealing the interior stone arch of what was likely a vaulted chamber; a final glimpse of medieval craftsmanship before the ruins disappeared entirely.

The oil painting offers tantalising details about the castle’s surroundings, including a small circular structure with a conical roof within the walled garden to the southeast. Whilst this could potentially have been a corner tower of a bawn enclosure, defensive walls that typically surrounded Irish tower houses, it was more likely a dovecote or some other structure associated with the later Corkbeg House. Today, visitors to this industrial site would find it hard to imagine that this patch of Cork’s coastline once bristled with medieval fortifications, though the painting in the boardroom serves as a quiet reminder of the layers of history buried beneath the refinery’s pipes and storage tanks.