The white castle was built onto an existing tower house at Clonroad between 1551 and 1558, expanding what had been a defensive structure into something far more domestic and imposing. By 1600 it was significant enough to be worth besieging, and by 1658 there is a documentary reference to the 'great ould house' being covered with slate or shingle, suggesting ongoing maintenance of a still-functioning residence. The clearest picture of what the complex once looked like comes from a sketch made by the English traveller Thomas Dineley in 1681. His drawing shows a tower house alongside a six-bay mansion, the whole enclosed within a bawn, a defended courtyard bounded by a curtain wall, with an arched entrance protected by a machicolation, the projecting parapet or gallery that allowed defenders to drop materials onto anyone attacking the gate below. Two bridges crossing the adjacent river appear in the same sketch, hinting at how the site connected to the wider town of Ennis. That visual record is now among the more valuable things to survive, because the physical fabric did not. A brewery and a building recorded as 'Clonroad House' were constructed on part of the site during the nineteenth century, and the layered remains of the white castle passed quietly out of the visible world.