This elevated position at Loughmerans in County Kilkenny may have been home to a medieval seignorial castle, though no physical evidence survives today; quarrying operations had completely removed the hilltop by 1987, erasing any traces of what might have stood there centuries earlier.

The historical record offers tantalising hints about this location’s past. When scholar Goddard Henry Orpen documented Kilkenny’s seignorial manors in 1909, he identified the manor of ‘Locmadran’, recorded in documents from 1247, with modern Loughmerans. Whilst local folk memory preserved stories of a castle at this spot, Orpen noted that the 1247 documentary evidence makes no explicit mention of such a fortification. Instead, the Extent Loughmethora describes more modest structures: a bretage (wooden tower), along with a grange, stable, and elevated sheep fold, all noted as being in poor, ruinous condition.

The manor itself appears to have seen better days by the mid thirteenth century. The same document characterises the demesne lands as poor and uncultivated, suggesting that whatever importance this site once held had already begun to fade. Whether a proper castle ever crowned this strategic hilltop remains a mystery, its secrets now lost to the quarryman’s pick and the passage of time.