The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1839 and 1910 both mark a rectangular ruin at the hilltop and label it "Stratford Castle (in ruins)", giving the impression of a medieval or early modern fortification with a proper name and a proper history. In reality, what stood there measured roughly twenty metres by eight, and the name appears to have carried more romance than accuracy.

Local tradition, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by O'Flanagan in 1928, offers a rather more mundane explanation. According to that account, the structure was a fowling house, a purpose-built shelter from which a gentleman could shoot game birds, constructed by Edward, Earl of Aldborough. The Aldborough title was an Irish earldom associated with the Stratford family, which explains the placename that attached itself to the ruin. A fowling house would have been a practical, if grand, piece of field sportsman's infrastructure, and siting one on a commanding hilltop made reasonable sense for surveying the surrounding terrain. The "castle" label, then, seems to have been either a polite inflation of what was there, or simply a later confusion that the maps then reinforced. Official records have wrestled with the ambiguity ever since, classifying the site as a castle in one survey period and retreating to the cautious phrase "building, possible, site" in another.

Nothing of the structure is now visible at ground level, so the hill preserves the mystery rather than resolving it. The interest lies less in what can be seen than in what the conflicting records reveal about how ruins accumulate names and meanings over time, sometimes quite disconnected from what they actually were.