Rather than stone walls rising from the earth, this site reveals itself through subtle marks in the fields; cropmarks that appear in aerial photographs taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland. These ghostly outlines show rectangular enclosures that archaeologists believe represent both a castle and its accompanying bawn, a fortified courtyard that would have provided defence for the castle’s inhabitants and their livestock.

The site appears on the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, clearly marked as ‘castle’, suggesting that some visible remains existed well into the 19th century. Today, however, the castle has all but vanished from ground level, leaving only these telltale patterns in the crops above to hint at the medieval structures beneath. These cropmarks form when plants grow differently over buried walls and ditches; the varying depths of soil and moisture levels cause crops to ripen at different rates, creating visible patterns best seen from above.

This information comes from the Archaeological Inventory of County Carlow, first published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1993, with updates added as recently as 2007 to reflect ongoing research. Sites like Straboe Castle remind us that Ireland’s medieval heritage often lies hidden just beneath the surface, waiting to be rediscovered through modern archaeological techniques and careful observation of the landscape.