What survives is poorly preserved, barely legible in the landscape. Yet a mid-seventeenth-century document suggests these unassuming remains may once have formed part of a small but reasonably substantial settlement.

The Civil Survey, carried out between 1654 and 1656 as part of the Cromwellian administration's effort to catalogue Irish landholdings for redistribution, recorded the property at Carrigatogher as comprising a castle, a stone house, the ruins of a mill, and two thatched tenements. The castle in question is the adjacent tower house, a form of fortified residence common across late medieval Ireland, typically a tall rectangular structure built by local lords or prosperous landowners. The stone house, a more domestic building, is what these fragmentary footings may represent. In 1640, the listed proprietor was one Richard Lennard, described as a shoemaker from the city of Limerick. It is an unexpectedly specific detail: a tradesman from an urban centre holding rural property in north Tipperary, with a mill on site suggesting some degree of agricultural or commercial activity before the upheavals of the 1640s reduced at least part of the complex to ruins.