This four-storey fortress was once the seat of a branch of the Fitzgerald family, who styled themselves as Barons of Burnchurch within Kilkenny’s former county palatinate. The castle’s strategic location, directly across from the medieval church and graveyard, made it an ideal stronghold for controlling the surrounding lands. Following the Cromwellian conquest, the last Baron, Richard Fitzgerald, was transplanted to Connaught in 1654, and his estates were granted to Colonel William Warden. Local tradition holds that Oliver Cromwell himself stayed here in March 1650 after the siege of Kilkenny, whilst his army camped around Burnchurch.

The tower house, designated as National Monument No. 321, is a sophisticated piece of defensive architecture dating from the late 15th or early 16th century. Built from roughly coursed limestone rubble with precisely cut corner stones, the structure measures approximately 11 metres north to south and 9.5 metres east to west. Its defensive features include a protective base batter, murder holes strategically placed above the entrance lobbies, and narrow arrow loops for defence. The original entrance, located on the north wall, was secured by a pointed archway fitted with iron fittings for a yett, a type of defensive gate. The castle was originally protected by a bawn wall, though today only a circular angle tower survives about 20 metres to the north; early 19th-century prints show that a defensive wall once connected these two towers.

Inside, the tower house reveals the complexity of late medieval domestic arrangements across its multiple floors. The ground floor served practical purposes with storage spaces and defensive loops, whilst the upper floors provided increasingly comfortable accommodation. The second floor features an original fireplace with distinctive joggled voussoirs, and the fourth floor, situated above a stone vault, served as the castle’s principal chamber with two-light windows offering views to the south and east. Secret chambers, garderobes, and intramural rooms honeycomb the thick walls, whilst a spiral staircase in the northeast corner leads to the roof level with its stepped crenellations and wall-walks. The castle remained inhabited well into the modern era; antiquarian Austin Cooper noted in the 1780s that it appeared “as if but lately inhabited”, and the last resident, Reverend William Swift, lived here until his death in 1817. Evidence of later modifications includes the roofline of a two-storey building that was once attached to the north wall, showing how this medieval fortress adapted to changing domestic needs over the centuries.