This vanished fortress once stood in Follistown parish within the barony of Skreen, though you won’t find any trace of it on the Down Survey maps created between 1656 and 1658. The castle’s absence from these detailed cartographic records makes its story all the more intriguing, as the Down Survey was meant to be a comprehensive mapping of Irish lands following the Cromwellian conquest.

What we do know comes from the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which reveals that Thomas Cusack held 242 acres here in 1640, complete with a castle. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1836, all that remained was a vague notation marking it as “the site of an old castle”, with no precise location given. Today, cattle graze peacefully across the pasture where the castle once stood, and not a single stone remains above ground to mark its presence.

The disappearance of Staffordstown Castle reflects a common tale across the Irish landscape, where countless fortifications have vanished completely, leaving only archival whispers of their existence. Whether the castle fell to siege, succumbed to centuries of stone robbing for local building projects, or simply crumbled through neglect, its complete erasure from the physical landscape stands as a reminder of how thoroughly time and circumstance can erase even substantial structures. The Archaeological Inventory of County Meath, first published in 1987 and revised as recently as 2016, confirms that despite archaeological interest, no physical evidence of this once prominent building survives.