On a low natural rise above poorly drained ground near Killare, the grass-covered wall footings of a long rectangular building sit quietly to the west of a levelled castle site, surrounded by a scatter of earthworks that include hut sites, a probable ancient road, and the remnants of an older field system. None of it announces itself loudly. The outlines are subtle enough that an aerial photograph taken in November 2011 did more to clarify the building's shape than any amount of ground-level observation.

The castle that once dominated this cluster of monuments was recorded on the Down Survey map of Killare parish, drawn between 1656 and 1659, a mid-seventeenth-century mapping project that documented landholdings across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian settlement. By that point the castle may already have been in decline; today it survives only as a levelled site. The rectangular building whose footings remain to its west was associated with a group of hut sites, and the whole complex sits in a landscape layered with earlier occupation: a ringfort, the enclosed farmstead type common across early medieval Ireland, lies immediately to the south-west, along with a field system connected to it. A motte and bailey castle, the earthwork fortification type introduced by the Normans, stands roughly 240 metres to the east. St Bridget's holy well and church are 150 metres to the south, and a post-medieval corn mill once operated about 300 metres to the north-east, with its associated mill pond still traceable to the south-south-west. A disused quarry immediately east of the castle site complicates the picture slightly, since some of the nearby earthworks may relate to quarrying activity rather than settlement. The whole site was surveyed by the National Monuments Service in 1985 and has since been protected under a preservation order.