The site once held what was likely a late 16th-century circular tower house, similar to others that dotted the surrounding landscape. The Civil Survey of 1654-6 recorded it as ‘one small destroyed castle repaireable’, owned in 1640 by Edmond Dwyer of Morestown, who was noted as an ‘Irish Papist’ in the records of that religiously turbulent era.

The castle’s gradual disappearance is well documented through historical sources. When surveyors mapped the area for the first Ordnance Survey in 1840-41, they drew a circular building on their maps. By the 1890s, however, historian Davis White found only ‘a little bit of wall which forms part of the out offices, attached to the residence’. More fascinating still was the testimony he collected from the property’s owner, who remembered the castle from his youth as a structure several stories high with a round design. The ground floor, he recalled, had been repurposed as a cow house; a rather humble end for what was once a defensive stronghold.

Today, nothing remains above ground of Ballinamona Castle, but its story reflects the fate of countless Irish tower houses that once served as both homes and fortifications for local families. These structures, built during times of constant territorial disputes and religious tensions, gradually fell into disrepair as their defensive purposes became obsolete. The transformation from castle to cow house, and eventually to nothing at all, tells a broader story about how Ireland’s built heritage has been lost, sometimes through conflict, but often through the simple passage of time and changing agricultural needs.