According to historical records, the castle once stood as a substantial structure, appearing on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a main building with two smaller structures to its south, all surrounded by small fields. The exact location has been debated; whilst historian Adams placed it at this mapped site in 1959, others have suggested the castle may have been closer to Dardistown House, which lies 580 metres to the north.

The castle’s significance becomes clearer through the 1655 Down Survey, which shows it standing on lands belonging to Sir Thomas Nugent, identified as an ‘Irish Papist’ during a period when such religious designation carried serious political consequences. The survey’s terrier provides a rare glimpse into the castle’s condition at that time, recording that Dardistown contained ‘a castle in repaire with diverse cabbins’, suggesting it remained inhabited and maintained alongside smaller dwellings, possibly housing estate workers or tenants.

Today, visitors to the site will find no visible remains of the castle that once dominated this landscape. The fields that now occupy the area give no hint of the fortified structure that stood here for centuries, leaving only historical maps and documents to mark its existence. This absence of physical evidence makes Dardistown Castle a particularly intriguing example of Ireland’s lost heritage, where the documentary record must stand in for the vanished stones.