Site of Annaghbride Castle, Annaghbride, Co. Galway

Historical records from 1574 show the castle was then owned by 'Therle Claricard', likely referring to the Earl of Clanricarde, one of the most powerful Gaelic-Norman families in Connacht. The castle's presence in these early documents suggests it played a role in the complex web of territorial control that characterised 16th-century Ireland.

By 1837, when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area, only ruins remained of what had been a substantial structure. The survey recorded a roughly rectangular building measuring about 25 metres north-northwest to south-southeast and 9 metres east-northeast to west-southwest, with a small eastern extension at its northern end. The OS Letters, compiled during the same period, described it simply as the 'ruins of an old castle', indicating that even then, its specific history had begun to fade from local memory.

Today, nothing visible remains above ground. Between the 1837 survey and the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey map, the last physical traces of Annaghbride Castle disappeared entirely, prompting cartographers to add the melancholic notation 'Site of' to mark where it once stood. The castle has joined the ranks of Ireland's many lost structures; buildings that once commanded the landscape but now exist only in historical records and beneath the soil of working farmland.