The site’s earliest documented connection dates to around 1260, when Richard, son of Alan de St. Florence, granted lands called Makarne to the Cistercian abbey of Duiske at Graiguenamanagh. By the mid-13th century, the Stafford family had established themselves at Ballymacane; Robert de Stafford held half the lands in 1247 as a quarter knight’s fee from the Valance estate, whilst William de Akevill controlled the other portion. The Staffords would maintain their presence here for centuries, with various family members holding the manor through the medieval period and beyond.

The castle itself appears to have been a substantial structure, depicted on the Down Survey maps of 1656-8 as a large building, possibly accompanied by a defensive bawn. An inscribed stone dated 1612 and bearing the initials of John, Dionysius and Richard Stafford survives at the site, testament to the family’s continued occupation during the early 17th century. By 1640, Nicholas Stafford owned 182 acres at Ballymacane plus another 520 acres in Tacumshin parish, though the political upheavals of the 1650s saw him listed for transplantation in 1653. The Act of Settlement of 1666 transferred 216 acres of an expanded Ballymacane estate to Thomas Barrington as part of a larger land grant totalling 615 acres.

Today, nothing remains of the castle above ground; it was demolished around 1750 according to Samuel Lewis’s topographical dictionary. A surviving photograph shows what may have been an early 17th-century replacement house, a four-bay, two-storey structure with an attic that itself fell to ruin. Local tradition holds that the field west of the modern house is cobbled beneath the surface, possibly marking the location of the castle’s bawn. The inscribed stone from 1612 remains the most tangible link to the Staffords’ centuries-long occupation of this now vanished stronghold.