It is the kind of quiet erasure that happens often enough in expanding urban areas, yet what makes this particular loss worth pausing over is the documentary evidence that survives to show what was once there, and how it was arranged.

The site is recorded as Correen Castle, referenced under the placename 'Counagh' on the Down Survey map of County Clare, the mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to catalogue confiscated Irish land. On the Down Survey Barony map of North Liberties, the castle is depicted as a tower house, the compact fortified residence typical of late medieval Ireland, usually consisting of a tall stone tower with small windows and a defended entrance, occupied by a local lord or landowning family. Crucially, the map shows the tower house not in isolation but standing beside a cluster of dwellings, indicating that this was a functioning settlement rather than a lone fortification. That small detail, a castle surrounded by ordinary houses, gives a sense of the social geography that has since been entirely overwritten. The site carries the reference number LI005-001001- in the national archaeological record, compiled here by Caimin O'Brien.

The castle's footprint can be traced on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which show the structure still present in the nineteenth century, but on the ground today there is little to orientate a visitor. The modern car park that now covers the area offers no obvious marker or signage relating to what lies beneath. The Down Survey map of the barony of North Liberties remains the most useful tool for understanding the original layout, and digitised versions are accessible through the Down Survey project online. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the Limerick environs, the gap between what the seventeenth-century map records and what the landscape currently presents is itself a kind of document.