What survives today is harder to read: farm sheds now cling to the north and east of the tower house, but there is no firm indication that these outbuildings are of any great age, despite an earlier suggestion to the contrary.

The source for the original arrangement is the Down Survey, a remarkable cartographic project carried out between 1656 and 1658 under the direction of William Petty. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, the Down Survey was intended to map forfeited lands in enough detail to allow their redistribution to soldiers and creditors. The parish map of Mayglass, within the barony of Forth, shows Ballycogly castle as a tower with a two-storey house attached, a pairing that was reasonably common in later medieval and early modern Ireland, where a defensive tower might be supplemented by more comfortable domestic accommodation alongside it. A local historian named Hore, writing in 1925, interpreted the farm sheds now attached to the tower as remnants of that early attached house, but the physical evidence does not support that reading with any confidence.