The Ordnance Survey letters, compiled in the nineteenth century, record a local tradition that the name refers to what was formerly a little village, though by the time the first edition six-inch OS map was drawn in 1840, the designation survived only as the name of a field lying immediately south of the old castle site. There is no visible trace above ground of any deserted settlement today. The ground is in pasture, and nothing obvious presents itself to the eye.

The broader historical picture, however, is less empty. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 describes a garrisoned castle at Greenane accompanied by thirty thatched houses and cabins, and notes that the castle and lands constituted a manor with the royalties of a court leet and baron, a manorial arrangement that gave the lord jurisdiction over local tenants and minor civil disputes. A decade or so later, in 1667, fifteen hearths were recorded in the townland, a figure drawn from the Hearth Money Rolls, a tax levied per fireplace that offers historians a rough measure of settlement size and relative prosperity. Taken together, these references describe a functioning, if modest, manorial community clustered around a castle in the mid-seventeenth century. What caused its disappearance is not recorded. Immediately north-west of the castle and an associated earthwork, a rectangular enclosure measuring roughly 72 metres north to south and 68 metres east to west has been identified. It is defined by the remains of a levelled bank and an external fosse, which is a ditch dug to reinforce a boundary or defensive perimeter. Sections of the bank and fosse survive along the eastern, northern, and western sides, but the southern extent has been lost. A few undulations mark the interior, though nothing clearly discernible emerges from them.

The site sits in ordinary farmland, and most of what is described here lies beneath the surface or has been reduced to the faintest of earthwork traces. The name Cloghawodeen, quietly preserved on old maps and in local memory, does more work than the landscape itself in keeping the former settlement in view.