First established as a FitzGerald manor and castle in the sixteenth century, the site was held by Oliver FitzGerald, half-brother to the Earl of Kildare, in 1528. The property changed hands numerous times throughout the tumultuous Tudor period; after Walter FitzGerald’s possible involvement in the 1535 rebellion of Silken Thomas, the crown seized the lands and leased them to various nobles, including the Earl of Ormonde in 1574. Though Edward FitzGerald reclaimed Ticroghan in 1599 after his father was killed by rebels, the castle’s most dramatic moment came in 1650 when Lady FitzGerald, daughter of Sir Luke, defended it against Cromwellian forces before eventually surrendering.

By 1640, according to the Civil Survey, Sir Luke FitzGerald’s Ticroghan estate comprised 425 acres complete with a castle, mill, and various farm buildings, alongside another 600 acres scattered across Clonard parish. The castle itself was an impressive structure, depicted on Down Survey maps as two towers connected by a central wing. At some point, likely during the Earl of Ormonde’s stay in 1649 during Cromwell’s siege of Drogheda, a bastioned fort was constructed around what was probably an existing tower house, and the site continued to serve as a garrison well into Charles II’s reign.

Though the castle survived into the late eighteenth century, with William Cooper’s 1794 drawing showing a substantial three-storey building featuring large windows with square hood-mouldings and a round-headed doorway, nothing remains today of what became known as Queen Mary’s Castle. The structure once stood at the southern angle of the bastioned fort, about 1.5 kilometres south of the old Dublin to Athlone road through Clonard and Kinnegad, near the modern M4 motorway. Today, visitors to the site will find no traces of the masonry that once housed generations of FitzGeralds and witnessed some of Ireland’s most turbulent centuries.