It is the sort of thing that raises questions. How did fragments from a demolished Cork castle end up mortared into a Midlands farmhouse? And why? The pieces have since been removed and returned to Mitchelstown, leaving the wall at Newcastle without its curious ornaments, but also without any satisfying explanation of how they got there in the first place.

The house itself sits on a low rise above the Inny River, a large rectangular block measuring roughly twenty metres by thirteen, originally two storeys over a basement. In 1680, Robert Choppayne purchased the lands of Newcastle from Gerald Fitzgerald, the 17th Earl of Kildare, and is believed to have built the front portion of the house around that time. Two years later, in 1682, a man named Nicholas Dowdall described it as a 'fayre house', which suggests it was already presenting well to visitors. Later additions expanded it considerably: a third storey was added, wings were built out at either end, and a porch was placed over the front door. Above that porch sits a 19th-century armorial plaque bearing the coat of arms of the King family, indicating a change of ownership somewhere along the line. The gable chimneys were at some point modernised in brick. Despite all this accumulated layering, the fabric of the building holds its history lightly; there is little surviving physical evidence, inside or out, to confirm with certainty whether the front block genuinely dates to the late seventeenth century or whether that attribution rests more on documentary tradition than on stone and mortar.