The castle’s strategic position made it an ideal defensive stronghold, and its remains still dominate the landscape today. Historical records from the Civil Survey of 1654-6 describe the site as ‘a Castle and the Walls of a stone house out of repaire’, suggesting the structure was already showing signs of deterioration by the mid-17th century. The property was held by James, Earl of Ormond, in 1640, placing it firmly within the sphere of one of Ireland’s most powerful Anglo-Norman families.

The tower house itself is a substantial rectangular structure, originally standing three storeys tall and built from roughly coursed limestone rubble. Its construction features several defensive elements typical of Irish tower houses, including a pronounced base batter that would have made scaling the walls extremely difficult for attackers. The building’s corners are reinforced with dressed quoins, whilst the south and west walls are supported by tall buttresses; though sadly, much of the stonework from the bases of both the batter and buttresses has been robbed over the centuries, exposing an internal facing that wasn’t meant to be visible. The eastern wall and the eastern section of the northern wall have been completely destroyed, leaving the structure partially open to the elements.

Beyond the main tower, remnants of a bawn wall can still be traced, extending north to south from approximately the centre of the northern wall and running east to west from the southern wall. These walls, measuring about 1.6 metres thick, would have enclosed a courtyard area where livestock could be secured during times of threat and where various domestic buildings would have stood. The combination of tower house and bawn represents a classic Irish defensive arrangement from the late medieval period, when local lords needed fortified residences that could withstand both raids and more sustained attacks during Ireland’s turbulent centuries of conquest and rebellion.