What visitors find today are faint earthen banks, so worn down by centuries that they’re barely distinguishable from the natural landscape. These subtle traces might reveal more of their secrets when viewed from above, where aerial photography can sometimes detect patterns invisible at ground level.

The castle’s story emerges more clearly through historical records than physical remains. During the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, surveyors documented it as merely a ‘stump of a castle ruined’, suggesting that even by the mid-17th century, the structure had already fallen into considerable decay. Just fourteen years earlier, in 1640, the property belonged to Philip Purcell, one of the last recorded owners before the castle’s abandonment.

The site’s elevated position would have provided strategic advantages in its heyday, commanding extensive views across the surrounding countryside; a crucial defensive feature for any medieval fortification. Today, those same sweeping vistas remain the most impressive aspect of a visit to this almost vanished castle, where imagination must fill in what time and weather have erased.