The castle appears on historic maps from the 18th and 19th centuries, including Roque’s 1760 map of County Dublin and Duncan’s 1821 map, where it’s marked in an area called Snowtown. According to the Civil Survey of 1654, John Cadle, an Irish Catholic, owned 300 acres here in 1641, complete with two mills and the castle itself. He also held substantial lands in the neighbouring areas of Borinstown, Mooresydes, and Flemingtown in Clonalvy parish.

The castle’s origins are somewhat murky; whilst local tradition suggests Richard Caddell built it in the 13th century, this seems unlikely given that Richard Caddell served as sheriff of Connaught in 1301 and the Caddell family were actually one of the tribes of Galway before adopting the name Blake in the seventeenth century. It’s more probable that the Caddells acquired the Naul estate through marriage at some later date. When antiquarian Austin Cooper visited in 1781, he described an impressive structure: ‘a large square castle with towers at each corner, whose diameters are equal to the spaces between them’, suggesting it was a tower house similar in design to the western tower at Lusk church.

The castle’s story took a dramatic turn in 1787 when most of the structure, then known as Whitecastle or Snowtown castle, was demolished. However, the eastern wall survived and was cleverly incorporated into the western side of Naul Park House, built around 1800 by the Ennis family who had inherited the property from the Pollard family. This five-bay, two-storey house faced east and stood until the 1980s when it too was demolished, though its ground floor footings are believed to remain. The land itself changed hands several times after John Cadle’s ownership; it passed to Arthur Mervyn who built three mills at Naul, then to the Pollards, and finally to the Ennis family who constructed the grand house that would stand for nearly two centuries.