Today, nothing remains visible above ground; the site exists only as a memory preserved in old maps and archaeological records. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey 6-inch map marked it as a circular area enclosed by a broken line, suggesting some form of defensive earthwork or fortification that was still recognisable to 19th-century surveyors.

By the time the third edition of the OS map was published in 1946, even these subtle traces had vanished, leaving cartographers to mark it simply as ‘Site of’, acknowledging that whatever structure once stood here had completely disappeared from the landscape. The castle’s exact nature remains somewhat mysterious; whether it was a proper stone fortress, a fortified house, or perhaps an earlier earthen ringfort adopted by the Kelly family is unclear from the archaeological record.

What we do know comes from the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra and Paul Gosling in 1999, which documents this lost piece of Galway’s heritage. Like many such sites across Ireland, Kelly’s Castle has been reclaimed by the land, its stones perhaps repurposed for field walls or farm buildings over the centuries, leaving only its name and a notation on historical maps to hint at the stories these fields once held.