The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 recorded it plainly: one small castle with a stone house at Balgriffin. No dramatic ruin survives to mark the spot, no tower poking above a treeline. What remains is a low-lying cluster of dilapidated farm buildings, and the castle itself has effectively dissolved into the landscape around it.

The Civil Survey, a mid-seventeenth-century inventory of landholding carried out in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, is one of the most detailed records of property ownership in Ireland from that period. Its entry for Balgriffin, cited by historian Robert Simington in his 1945 edition of the survey, names James Bath as the man who held this small castle and its accompanying stone house. Bath was no minor local figure; he owned extensive estates in the Drumcondra area, making Balgriffin one node in a considerably larger network of landholding on the northern fringes of what was then the city's reach. The Bath family were part of the Old English Catholic gentry whose fortunes were, in many cases, upended by the Cromwellian settlement that followed the survey's compilation.

The site at Balgriffin Park is not signposted as a castle, and visiting with that expectation would likely lead to confusion. What the researcher Geraldine Stout documented in 2011 is a farm complex in poor condition, with no early stonework visible in the surviving structures. The castle's fabric has either been robbed out, absorbed into later agricultural buildings, or simply collapsed beyond recognition. For anyone interested in the archaeology of disappeared structures, that absence is itself worth noting; the Civil Survey entry is the primary evidence that anything of consequence once stood here, and the landscape holds no obvious confirmation of it.