There are no earthworks, no humps and hollows in the ground, no surviving trace of the streets or structures that once made up a functioning town. The land offers nothing to the eye, yet the documentary record makes clear that a community existed here, dense enough to warrant the formal designation of castle, town, and lands.

The evidence comes from a legal process known as an Inquisition, a formal inquiry used in post-medieval Ireland to establish the extent and ownership of property, often conducted after the death or attainder of a landholder. In an early seventeenth-century Inquisition concerning the property of one Gerald Grace, the record lists the castle, towne and lands of Carney as a distinct and recognised entity. The Grace family were a significant Anglo-Norman presence in Tipperary and Kilkenny, and the mention of a town alongside the castle suggests that Carney was once more than a lone fortified residence. The tower house itself still stands nearby, a compact stone structure of the kind common across Munster and Connacht between roughly the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, typically consisting of several storeys within a single rectangular tower. But whatever settlement clustered around it has left no mark on the landscape that survives at ground level.