Punch-dressed, meaning shaped and textured by a pointed tool to produce a rough, patterned face, these stones are all that remains above ground of Fermoyle Castle, reused in agricultural structures long after the original building fell out of use or ruin.

The castle was reputedly raised in the early seventeenth century by the O'Sullivans of Formoyle and Ballycarna, a sub-sept of the wider O'Sullivan More dynasty, one of the most powerful Gaelic lordships in Munster. The family's presence here was not without its dangers. Owen O'Sullivan was wounded in an engagement with Cromwellian forces at nearby Ballinskelligs in 1641, a detail that places the castle squarely in the violent upheaval of that decade, when Cromwell's campaigns through Ireland dismantled Gaelic and Old English power alike. What became of the structure after that conflict is not recorded, but the fate of its dressed stonework is legible enough; removed and reset into humbler walls, the blocks survived by becoming useful rather than defensible.