Known to locals simply as ‘Caisleán’, meaning castle, this unassuming spot features a vertical rock face roughly three metres high on its eastern side, which overlooks a small stream below. The site’s name has become so embedded in local geography that it’s even lent itself to an offshore rock marked on Ordnance Survey maps as An Caisleán.

While no standing masonry remains visible today, the site reveals tantalising clues about what once stood here. Disturbed soil across the knoll exposes abundant traces of limestone mortar, with further remnants visible near the top of the rock face. These fragments suggest that a stone structure, quite possibly a castle or fortified building, once commanded this coastal position. The strategic location, with its natural defensive advantage provided by the vertical rock face and proximity to the sea, would have made it an ideal spot for such a fortification.

Archaeological records from the 1993 inventory of County Galway note that this could indeed be the site of the castle from which the entire locality takes its name. Though the physical structure has long since vanished, leaving only mortar traces and local memory, the persistent use of ‘Caisleán’ in the area’s placenames suggests this was once a site of some local importance. Today, visitors will find little more than a grassy hillock and rock face, but the scattered mortar in the soil serves as a quiet reminder of the medieval or early modern structure that likely once stood guard over this stretch of Galway coastline.