The site offers commanding views along the Coon valley in all directions, from the Dinin river valley below to the gentle hills that roll away into the distance. Today, visitors will find little of the original castle that once dominated this landscape; instead, a raised earthwork platform marks where Castle Quan, or Caislen Churain Fheidhlim Ui Neill as it was known in Irish, once stood.

The castle’s demise came around 1830, when local pragmatism trumped preservation. The substantial greenstone structure, which had weathered centuries, was systematically dismantled to provide building materials for the nearby Coon chapel, which now stands immediately east of the site alongside its graveyard. According to historical accounts from 1839, the castle ruins had still been considerable just twelve years earlier, sitting at the centre of a square enclosure roughly 41 metres across, protected by an impressive defensive ditch measuring 2.4 metres deep and 3.6 metres wide. Local tradition held that this was the Castle of the Whelps of Feilim O’Neill, though by 1790 documents simply referred to it as Castlecoonfeily.

What survives today is the bawn itself; the raised platform that once surrounded and protected the castle. The deep fosse that encircled the fortification can still be traced, and according to early twentieth-century accounts, the castle’s cellars remained intact beneath the surface. Though the stone walls have long since been repurposed into the fabric of the local church, the earthworks continue to mark this strategic position above the river, a subtle reminder of the medieval power that once controlled this corner of Kilkenny.