Locally, though, people have always called it 'the Castle', and once you know what lies beneath its floor, the grander title makes more sense. Across the River Brick in Lixnaw, County Kerry, the remains of this structure conceal something more elaborate than the label 'house of indeterminate date' might suggest: four arched cellars, each sealed off from the others, served by a narrow passageway running roughly north to south for fourteen metres, its walls pierced by slit windows that splay inward to catch what little light they can.

The tower measures sixteen metres by nine externally, and its construction is thought to be broadly contemporary with a nearby building known as the Old Court, placing it somewhere in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The relationship between the two structures may have been functional as well as chronological; one interpretation is that this building served as a defensive outpost for the Old Court, positioned across the river to control or observe the approaches to it. The four cellars below the first floor fall into two pairs by size: the outermost two measure roughly three metres by six and a half, while the inner pair are slightly smaller at two and a half by five and a half. All of them originally had narrow slit windows, the kind designed to admit light and air while limiting exposure to anyone outside, though every one of these openings has since been blocked up. The passageway connecting the cellar zone is lit from the west by a damaged doorway to the south-west and by three further slit windows set along its length.

What remains standing is ruinous, and the blocked windows give the lower level a sealed, inward quality. The divergence between the map name and the local one is itself worth pausing over, since it hints at two quite different readings of the same fabric: one romantic and retrospective, the other rooted in a practical memory of what the building once was or felt like to those who lived near it.