The castle belonged to Walter Browne, who died in 1611, leaving behind an impressive estate that included two castles, twenty houses with gardens, and 180 acres of land in Kilpatrick, also known as Dorsankill. Just 180 metres to the southeast, a medieval church and graveyard still stand, remnants of the area’s long history of settlement.

Historical records paint a picture of changing fortunes for this site. When Walter’s son William inherited the estate at age thirty, he held the lands as a tenant to Lancelot Bulkeley, the Archbishop of Dublin. By 1641, William Browne, listed as an ‘Irish Papist’, owned 314 acres in Kilpatrick, but the family’s Catholic faith would prove problematic during the turbulent years that followed. Curiously, no castle appears on the 1657 Down Survey map of Kilpatrick Parish, suggesting the building may have already fallen into decline by that point.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan shows the site still had standing rectangular buildings arranged in a farmyard configuration, marked as ‘Old Castle’. Today, visitors will find only low mounds of rubble where these structures once stood. To the west of these remains, a large sub-rectangular area enclosed by a low earthen bank with an external fosse, visible from the east around to the southwest, hints at the castle’s former defensive layout and the extent of its grounds.