Built sometime around or after 1500, this squat tower house measures 14 metres by 10 metres and rises to just 9.45 metres in height, though its walls are an impressive 2.4 metres thick; nearly double what you’d find in contemporary castles like Adare or Askeaton. The castle may have been erected by Catherine, daughter of the Earl of Desmond, who died in 1506 and was commemorated in the Annals of the Four Masters as a charitable woman who built fortifications, though there’s some scholarly debate whether this reference actually refers to Dunmanway Castle in Cork instead.

The castle’s defensive features reveal the paranoia of its builders: entering through the main door, visitors would pass beneath a murder hole, a sinister opening through which defenders could rain down missiles or boiling liquids on unwelcome guests. The ground floor consists of a vaulted chamber lit only by narrow loopholes, with no fireplace to offer comfort; clearly this space prioritised defence over domesticity. The residential quarters occupied the upper floors, where the castle’s only fireplace warmed the principal apartment, and narrow windows provided marginally better lighting. Among the castle’s more curious features is a sheela na gig, one of those enigmatic carved female figures that appear on medieval Irish buildings, grotesquely displaying her genitalia in what scholars still debate was either a fertility symbol or a ward against evil.

The castle’s documented history traces ownership through various English and Anglo-Irish families, from the Thursteyn family who gave their name to the surrounding townland, through the Maunsells, Lacyes, and Thorntons, until it was confirmed to E. Ormsby in 1666. By 1840, Victorian antiquarians found it already in ruins, though they noted a chimney that still rose 16 feet above the main structure. Lady Dunraven’s detailed architectural survey of 1865 provides our most comprehensive account of the building, recording everything from the chess-board pattern punched into the door jambs to the peculiar dripstones over the windows, characteristic of Irish buildings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.