The antiquarian John O’Donovan documented the site in 1839, noting that even by his time, no definitive traces of the castle remained standing. The castle once stood adjacent to a church and what may have been an abbey, suggesting this was once a significant ecclesiastical and defensive complex in medieval Carlow.

Today, visitors to Haroldstown will find no visible remains of the castle that once commanded this spot. The site’s history comes to us primarily through documentary evidence rather than physical ruins, a common fate for many of Ireland’s lesser fortifications that were abandoned, demolished, or quarried for building materials over the centuries. The Archaeological Inventory of County Carlow, first published in 1993 by the Stationery Office in Dublin, catalogues this lost castle alongside the nearby church and possible abbey remains, preserving its memory in the official archaeological record.

The proximity of the castle to religious buildings was typical of medieval Irish settlements, where secular and ecclesiastical power often existed side by side. Though the stones have long since disappeared, the site remains an important piece of Carlow’s medieval heritage; a reminder that not all history is written in standing monuments, but sometimes in the absence of what once was.