Three chamfered sills, the kind that once formed the base of two-light windows, and two chamfered window jambs, all bearing the small square sinkings that once held iron bars, are the most tangible survivors of a tower house with a particularly turbulent past. A chamfered edge, where a stone corner is cut away at an angle, is a common detail of late medieval Irish stonework, and these fragments are among the few original elements that remain legible after waves of destruction and renovation.

The site's history begins well before these stones were cut. A castle at Dun Loich was built in 1215 by Maurice FitzGerald, but after the Geraldines were defeated at the battle of Callan in 1261, the MacCarthys demolished and burned it. It was apparently refortified, only to be abandoned again in 1280 when its guards fled in fear of MacCarthy forces and burned it as they left. The ruins visible today belong to a later tower house associated with the O'Sullivan Mores, a structure that fared little better: the Earl of Ormond demolished it in 1570, yet the O'Sullivans seem to have returned, and a Daniel O'Sullivan of Dunloe was sitting in Parliament representing Kerry as late as 1613. The castle was forfeited in 1656 and passed to Sir William Petty, the surveyor and polymath who acquired vast tracts of Kerry after the Cromwellian settlement. By the late seventeenth century it had come into the hands of the O'Mahony family, and in the 1820s one of them renovated it substantially. A pencil sketch by Westropp, dated 1891 and preserved in the Royal Irish Academy, records the building in its renovated form. It is now ruinous once more.

The tower house sits on an elevated ridge at the northern end of the hotel grounds, overlooking a bend of the River Laune. The nineteenth-century renovations were extensive: the east wall was largely rebuilt and shifted inward from its original course, most windows were replaced with ogee-headed brickwork openings, and a pointed doorway was inserted into the south wall at first-floor level. Traces of the timber floors and wall-shutterings from that Victorian intervention still survive inside, though the upper floors are inaccessible. The limestone fragments on the southern steps are easy to overlook, yet they are likely the oldest stonework remaining on site, casual survivors of everything the place has been through.