Yet that is what survives at Cloghaneleesh, the crossing point that once controlled access to Ballingarry Castle on its narrow Kerry peninsula. The wall itself, roughly 1.6 metres thick with carefully cut-stone corners set into the cliff face, still stands to measurable dimensions. The tower that once led down to the drawbridge by stairway or slope has been filled in, leaving the defensive logic of the place visible but incomplete, like a sentence missing its final clause.

The castle at Ballingarry was likely begun around 1280 by the Cantillon family, and it was laid out in the manner of a promontory fort, a form of defensive enclosure that uses the natural geography of a headland, in this case an isthmus, to limit the directions from which attack is possible. A semi-circular earthen bank on the mainland, roughly 120 metres long and 10 metres wide, formed the outermost line of that early defence. In 1585 the Cantillon lands passed to George Isham, who collected rents without disturbing the occupants, but the site was drawn into sharper conflict by 1602, when Garrett Roe Stack, brother-in-law to Lord Kerry, garrisoned the castle. Sir Charles Wilmot besieged it for over a year, and when Gerald Mac Morris surrendered in 1603, he was executed along with several of the garrison's leaders. During the Cromwellian wars, the castle came under Colonel David Crosbie, a loyalist who, according to the eighteenth-century antiquary Charles Smith, constructed a new small castle and extended the whole complex considerably. Crosbie dug two trenches leading to the drawbridge, built houses on the peninsula to settle English families, and held the position with supplies and ammunition provided by his ally Lord Inchiquin of Clare. The aumbry noted in the surviving wall, a small recess typically used for storage, and the loophole with its wide inward splay speak to the particular priorities of that garrison life: defence, supply, and the management of a confined and exposed space.