The castle first appears in historical records as ‘Clunicully’ in the 1655 Down Survey terrier of Farbill barony, where it’s depicted as a tower house on lands that belonged to Sir Luke Fitzgerald in 1640. The Survey’s detailed mapping shows it as a significant structure in the local landscape, positioned about 60 metres north of the present townland boundary.

By 1837, when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six inches to the mile, the castle appeared as a rectangular structure, suggesting it was still relatively intact or at least its foundations were clearly visible. However, something happened in the following decades; when the OS revisited for their 1913 twenty-five inch map, they found nothing worth recording. Today, visitors searching for the castle site need to look about 50 metres northwest of where the 1837 map indicated, a reminder of how landmarks can shift in local memory and mapping over time.

What remains is largely archaeological rather than architectural. When surveyed in 1983, researchers found large chunks of masonry forming an irregular mound, with no decorative or worked stone visible to hint at the castle’s original appearance or date. The site isn’t isolated though; a separate building lies to the west, whilst earthworks extend south and west of the castle ruins, suggesting this was once a more extensive settlement. Modern technology has revealed more: Digital Globe aerial photography shows traces of a roughly rectangular cropmark, perhaps the ghost of the castle’s original footprint still visible from above, even as its stones have long since tumbled or been carried away for other building projects.