What the Ordnance Survey maps of the 19th century labelled as Clonarney Church appears to actually be the remains of Clonarney Castle, a tower house that once belonged to William Moore, described in 1641 records as an ‘Irish Papist’. The 1655 Down Survey map clearly shows a tower house structure marked as ‘in repaire’, with no church depicted in this townland at all. This rectangular building, measuring approximately 12 metres north to south by 7.6 metres east to west, sits on a low rise surrounded by earthworks that represent an old field system, with the Stonyford River flowing 110 metres to the east.

Though heavily cloaked in ivy and partially obscured by material dumped from graveyard clearances, enough architectural details survive to confirm this was a residential tower house rather than a place of worship. The building doesn’t follow the traditional east;west alignment expected of a church, and no foundations of such a structure have been found elsewhere in the graveyard. The castle originally stood three storeys high, with a stone vault above the first floor that still partially survives. At first floor level, fascinating features remain visible: a spiral staircase in the northeast corner that once led to the destroyed second floor, a flat;headed doorway in the north wall that opens onto a mural passage with a cross;slab ceiling leading to a garderobe in the northwest corner, and the remnants of a fireplace in the west wall.

The castle’s defensive and domestic features paint a picture of life in a 17th;century Irish tower house. Square recesses in the northwest and northeast corners likely supported timber wall plates for the wooden ceiling over the ground floor, whilst the protruding section of the west wall’s northern end probably housed the garderobe chute and chimney flue. The ground floor entrance was most likely through a doorway in the now;destroyed east wall. Today, the structure stands as a testament to the complex history of land ownership and religious identity in early modern Ireland, its true nature hidden for generations behind an ecclesiastical misnomer on official maps.