A chamfered edge, in stonework terms, is a corner that has been cut away at an angle, typically to give a decorative finish to a functional surface. These pieces were not placed here deliberately as display; they are simply what remains of windows that no longer exist, left on the steps as the building around them continued its long process of coming undone.

The castle at this site has had an unusually turbulent existence even by the standards of medieval Kerry. Maurice FitzGerald built a castle at Dun Loich in 1215, and within fifty years it had been demolished and burned by the MacCarthys following the Geraldine defeat at the battle of Callan in 1261. Refortified not long afterwards, it was abandoned again in 1280 when its guards fled for fear of MacCarthy and his forces, and was burned a second time. The existing ruins belong to a later tower house, a tall rectangular fortified residence of the kind common across late medieval Ireland, associated with the O'Sullivan Mores. The Earl of Ormond demolished it again in 1570, yet the O'Sullivans appear to have returned; Daniel O'Sullivan of Dunloe sat in Parliament representing Kerry in 1613. The castle was forfeited in 1656 and passed to Sir William Petty, the surveyor and polymath who acquired vast tracts of Kerry during the Cromwellian settlement. By the late 1600s it had become the property of the O'Mahony family, and in the 1820s one of that family renovated and altered it substantially, inserting a pointed doorway in the south wall and replacing most of the windows with ogee-headed brick surrounds. A pencil sketch by the antiquary Westropp, dated 1891, records the building in that renovated state.

The tower house now stands in the grounds of the Dunloe Hotel, on an elevated ridge at the northern end, overlooking a bend of the River Laune. The nineteenth-century east wall was rebuilt and shifted slightly inward from its original line, and the remains of timber floors and wall-shutterings from the 1820s renovation survive inside, though the upper floors are inaccessible. The limestone fragments on the steps outside are the most legible reminder that an earlier, pre-renovation building once had windows of quite different character, their bars long gone, their dressed stonework now loose on the stairs.