Though no trace of the castle remains visible today in the flat pastureland, historical records paint a vivid picture of what once stood here. The Down Survey parish map of Drumraney shows a tower house type castle at Lissanode, positioned near the townland boundary with Ballycloghduff. In 1640, these lands belonged to the Dillon family, one of the prominent Anglo-Norman families who had established themselves in the Irish midlands centuries earlier.

The castle’s moment in recorded history came during the Nine Years’ War, when Hugh O’Neill’s forces swept through the region in January 1600. Captain Edmund Lyster’s letter to Christopher Nugent, Baron of Delvin, provides a firsthand account of the devastation: O’Neill’s men burned Sir Theobald Dillon’s town and seized both Lissanode Castle and nearby Bellanegloghduff Castle, installing their own garrisons. The attack was so thorough that Sir Theobald fled with his family to Athlone that very night, abandoning his ancestral lands to the Ulster forces. This brief occupation marked Lissanode’s role in one of the most significant conflicts in Irish history, as Gaelic lords made their last major stand against English expansion.

By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1838, the castle was already a memory, its location marked about 200 metres south of the 18th century Lissanode House. Curiously, a pencilled note on the same map suggests an alternative location closer to the house, at the southwest corner of its grounds, though archaeologists visiting in 1983 found no surface remains at either spot. Today, visitors searching for Lissanode Castle will find only peaceful farmland, but the site remains an evocative reminder of the turbulent centuries when tower houses dotted the Irish landscape and control of such strongholds could shift overnight.