By 1971, the traces were gone at ground level, leaving nothing visible to a walker crossing the gentle north-east-facing slope today.

The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 caught the place in a state of late neglect, describing it as having 'a small castle wanting repaire & few cabbins'. At that point the land was under the proprietorship of Nicholas Everard of Fethard, though it had been occupied in 1640 by Thomas Henes, also of Fethard, described as a burgess, who held it by lease at a rent of twenty pounds per annum with twenty-five years still unexpired. That castle is almost certainly the Barrettstown tower house, a form of fortified residence common in late medieval Ireland, typically a tall stone structure with a vaulted ground floor and residential chambers above, and this one dates from the 15th or 16th century. Around it, aerial photographs taken between 1966 and 1971 revealed a complex of earthworks spreading roughly 400 metres to the south and west of the tower house: the outlines of plots, trackways, and the footprint of a small community that had once clustered around the fortified residence. The photographs show what ground survey could not, since by the time the cameras were pointing downward, the earthworks were already being erased by agricultural activity. By 1971, the process was complete.

The loss is a common one in the Irish midlands and south, where intensive farming has quietly removed the surface evidence of hundreds of such settlements over the past century. What makes Barrettstown worth pausing over is the narrow window the aerial record provides: a few frames of black-and-white photography from the late 1960s preserving the plan of a place that the Civil Survey had already described as crumbling more than three hundred years earlier.