Today, visitors will find only a low mound measuring roughly 12.5 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west, rising barely half a metre high, with a few stones scattered about; the sole remnants of what was described in 1837 as ‘a lofty square tower’. Built in 1535 by the Mac Carthys, one of Munster’s most powerful Gaelic families, the castle stood for over four centuries before meeting an unceremonious end in the late 1940s.

The tower’s decline was gradual at first. A photograph from 1910 shows it heavily draped in ivy, romantic yet foreboding in its decay. Even into the 1940s, the adventurous could still climb the internal circular stairway to reach the battlements, though the structure was clearly deteriorating. The castle’s fate was sealed in 1948/49 when the ruins were completely levelled, with every stone carted away to build boundary walls for a new housing scheme; a pragmatic if rather ignominious end for a building that had witnessed the transition from Gaelic to English rule when it passed from the Mac Carthys to the Travers family in the 17th century, and later to the Townsends in the 19th.

The castle once stood within the demesne of Garrycloyne House, which itself was demolished in the early 1940s. Though both the grand house and its defensive predecessor have vanished, echoes of the estate remain in the landscape. Rusticated gate piers still stand sentinel at what was once the main entrance, whilst a ruined gate lodge and crumbling farm buildings offer tangible connections to the property’s more recent past. The 1842 Ordnance Survey map captures this lost landscape, showing the castle still standing proudly within its demesne; a reminder that even the most solid-seeming structures can disappear almost without trace, leaving only gentle undulations in a field to mark where history once stood tall.