It is a ruin that has been a ruin for a very long time; by 1839, when the Ordnance Survey first mapped it at six inches to the mile, it was already labelled in gothic lettering as "Castle (in Ruins)", and the 1924 edition repeated the designation without revision. The building is positioned deliberately: the Corrock cuts east to west through a ravine immediately to the south, and a smaller stream drops away to the north-south on the western side, making the bluff a natural defensive perch.

The wall section that survives probably represents the south-east angle of the original house, with a return running south. Its details are telling: musket loops at ground level in both the east-west wall and the southern return suggest a structure built or adapted with armed defence in mind, while a fireplace in the south wall at first-floor level and a small cupboard set into the wall at the second floor speak to domestic use alongside any military function. The ground and second floors were carried on rebates cut into the masonry, but the first floor was supported on granite corbels, a slight irregularity that hints at some modification or phased construction. The earliest references place the castle in occupation during the early seventeenth century, when a Thomas Roche lived there, though ownership at that time lay with the Suttons. By 1641, a Robert Roche held 180 acres at Dungeer and the nearby townland of Mulmontry, but a survey of that date does not mention the castle specifically, suggesting it may already have been falling out of active use. The Down Survey of 1656 to 1658, which mapped landownership across Ireland following the Cromwellian confiscations, does record the castle in its delineation of the boundary of Bantry barony, placing it within a broader picture of dispossession and redistribution that reshaped this part of Wexford in the mid-seventeenth century. Archaeological testing carried out in 2008, in an area roughly thirty-five metres to the north of the standing remains, produced no related material, leaving the site's earlier history without physical corroboration.