This strategic spot, which offers commanding vistas in every direction, once housed a tower house that appears on an early 17th-century map of Ardagh barony, where it’s marked in the townland then known as ‘Blewtoge’. The castle’s importance is underscored by historical records from 1620, when Thomas Nugent was granted the property, which included not just the castle itself but also 100 acres of arable land and pasture, plus an additional 30 acres of woodland and bog in what was then called Blightoge, adjacent to Lisrean.

The castle’s existence is well documented throughout the 17th century. When surveyors compiled the Down Survey in 1655–6, their terrier for Street parish noted that ‘in Blighloge there Stands a Castle’, confirming the structure was still prominent in the landscape during the Cromwellian period. The various spellings of the townland name; Blewtoge, Blightoge, Blighloge; reflect the fluid nature of place names in early modern Ireland, eventually settling into the current Castlenugent.

Today, visitors to the site will find little evidence of the once substantial building. Where the castle once stood, only subtle earthworks remain; low banks of earth and stone that follow no clear pattern, offering tantalising but fragmentary hints of the structure that once dominated this elevated position. These modest traces belie the site’s former significance as a Nugent stronghold, leaving much to the imagination about the tower house that once watched over this corner of County Longford.