Not dramatically, not through any single recorded catastrophe, but so completely that nothing of it remains at ground level, and nobody is quite sure where it stood.

The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land assessment carried out under Cromwellian administration to establish ownership and value across Ireland, recorded the settlement at Lismalin with reasonable precision for its time. The surveyors noted that upon the lands stood "a good castle with a bawne & twelve cabbins." The castle was a tower house, the kind of tall, fortified stone residence that local lords built across Ireland from the fourteenth century onwards. The bawn was its walled enclosure, a defensive courtyard where cattle could be secured and which offered some protection to those living nearby. Those twelve cabins clustered around it would have housed the dependent community, labourers and tenants whose lives orbited the tower. It is a compact, legible picture of how rural settlement worked in early modern Tipperary. The difficulty is that none of it can now be found. The tower house itself is a separate recorded structure, but the settlement the surveyors described has left no visible trace, and its precise location and extent remain unknown.