Today, visitors searching for Tulla Castle will find little more than a poorly preserved limestone wall, barely 3.9 metres long and less than half a metre high, partially incorporated into the base of the graveyard’s enclosing wall. These modest remnants, bonded with washed-out lime mortar, offer scant evidence of the tower house that once commanded views across to Garruragh House and Castle to the northeast. The site sits just west of the early 18th-century church and the location of the earlier St Mochulla’s Church, both integral parts of this historic ecclesiastical landscape.

The castle’s history proves as elusive as its physical remains. Built by the MacNamara clan sometime before 1574, when it first appears in historical records under the ownership of Donell Reogh MacNamara, the structure seems to have had a remarkably brief lifespan. By 1613, according to antiquarian sources, it lay in ruins, suggesting it stood for perhaps forty years at most. Local historian Thomas Westropp, writing in 1911, noted that fragments including cellars and a doorway had survived into the 1830s, though by his time nothing visible remained above ground. More recent investigations have uncovered tantalising hints of the castle’s former extent; dressed limestone blocks built into the churchyard wall, a portion of a doorway jamb incorporated into the ruined church, and intriguingly, a subsurface masonry wall about 1.5 metres below ground that may represent the castle’s bawn wall.

The site’s documentation tells its own story of gradual disappearance. Absent from the 1840 Ordnance Survey maps, Tulla Castle appears only as a marked site on the 1921 edition, already relegated to memory rather than physical presence. Modern archaeological surveys have confirmed what local knowledge has long held; that the castle once stood within the historic graveyard bounds, though its exact footprint remains debatable. The phenomenon of new graves respecting the line of buried walls suggests that even in its absence, the castle continues to shape the landscape of Tulla Hill, its foundations still defining boundaries centuries after its stones were carried away.