The castle ruins sit atop an eight-metre-high cliff of old red sandstone, with the Dungourney River flowing along its northwestern edge. When engineers built a new road in the 19th century, they carved straight through part of the outcrop, forever altering the castle’s original footprint.

The flat summit of the rock, measuring roughly 12 by 14 metres, preserves the grass-covered foundations of what appears to have been a rectangular tower house. The stone foundations, still visible up to a metre high in places, outline a structure that measured approximately 12 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south. Near the centre, surviving masonry walls about two metres square suggest the ground floor was divided into two separate chambers, a typical arrangement for medieval Irish tower houses.

This stronghold belonged to a junior branch of the Barry family of Barrymore, who were sometimes known rather fittingly as the ‘Barrys of the Rock’. The castle would have commanded impressive views over the surrounding countryside and river valley, making it both a defensive position and a statement of the family’s local authority. Today, while much reduced from its original grandeur, the site offers a tangible connection to Cork’s medieval past, even as modern infrastructure continues to encroach upon these ancient places.