It is not especially dramatic to look at: a surviving section of the north and east sides of what was once a rectangular walled enclosure, partially levelled sometime before 1897 when the Ordnance Survey recorded what remained. A draw well, the kind hauled by rope and bucket rather than a pump, was noted standing inside the earthwork around forty metres to the north-west of the main site. Most visitors to the area would pass it without a second glance. What makes it quietly interesting is the name attached to it on the maps: Castle Coote, birthplace of a general who reshaped an empire, reduced now to a grassy angle in the ground.

The lands here were recorded in the 1659 Civil Survey under the name Knockash, owned at that time by John Gould FitzWilliam. There was no mention of any castle. By 1667, however, ownership had passed to a man named Chidley Coote, who acquired the property from a Catherine Bligh. It is likely that a fortified or castellated house, the sort of substantial country residence common among the Anglo-Irish gentry of the period, was built on the site around this time. A son, probably also named Chidley Coote and a clergyman, later held the property, and it was here in 1726 that Lieutenant General Sir Eyre Coote was born. Coote went on to become one of the more consequential British military figures of the eighteenth century, associated closely with campaigns in India. The house in which he was born was demolished in the latter half of that same century. What replaced it, roughly 255 metres to the north-east, was the building now known as Ash Hill Towers: a six-bay, three-storey country house completed in 1781, originally built for Eyre Evans rather than the Cootes, and later extensively reworked in the Gothic Revival style with towers added in 1831 by architect Charles Frederick Anderson, though those towers were subsequently removed.

The earthwork itself is on private land within the Ash Hill demesne, so access depends on the discretion of the current owners. The site is not signposted or formally presented to visitors. Those with an interest in landscape archaeology will find more to read in the ground than is immediately obvious: the remnant banks suggest the scale of the original enclosure, and the relationship between this footprint and the later house to the south-west illustrates how gentry estates in Ireland frequently shifted their physical centre across generations. The scholar T.J. Westropp noted the site in 1906 with characteristic brevity, recording simply that it was marked near Ashill Towers. That spare notation captures the site well enough.