The Down Survey, that remarkable cartographic project undertaken in the 1650s following the Cromwellian conquest, shows a house with a chimney marked on the barony map of Ardee at this location. Created between 1656 and 1658, these maps were meant to document lands that would be redistributed to Cromwell’s soldiers and adventurers, but they also captured glimpses of Ireland’s built heritage at a pivotal moment in history.

Local folklore kept the story alive well into the twentieth century. In the 1930s, schoolchildren collecting stories for the Irish Folklore Commission recorded that there was said to be a castle in Jack Murphy’s field in Reaghstown. This oral tradition, preserved in the Schools’ Manuscripts collection, suggests that even as physical traces disappeared, the memory of something significant at this spot persisted through generations of local residents.

By 1966, the field itself was still known locally by its association with the supposed castle site, though any actual remains had become impossible to pinpoint. Whether this was a tower house typical of the late medieval period, a fortified residence of an Anglo-Norman family, or perhaps a more modest defensive structure remains unknown. What survives is the intriguing combination of documentary evidence and folk memory; a house substantial enough to merit inclusion on a major survey, and significant enough to embed itself in local tradition for nearly three hundred years after it last appeared on any map.