It was only in 2010, through geophysical survey, that the footprint of the structure came back into focus, tracing the remains of a building that once sat just outside the castle's outer ward defences in the area now known as Dukesmeadows.

The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 captured the complex in remarkable documentary detail. The surveyors described what they called 'the greate Stable', a double building divided into two parts, measuring roughly 96 feet by 38 feet (approximately 29 by 11.6 metres). The rear section was fitted with beams intended to form lofts, and the surveyors noted that if these were repaired, the space would hold 2,000 barrels of wheat, suggesting the building had already begun to shift from its original purpose towards grain storage during the disruptions of the mid-century wars. Alongside it lay a separate plot of ground described as the place 'where ye Publique Store of hey was kept', a hay stand of 40 perches in extent. The language of the survey, with its phonetic spellings and careful measurements, gives an unusual intimacy to a building that no longer stands above ground. By 1719, the complex was in a poor enough state that Kilkenny Corporation assigned funds specifically for repairing the castle stables, a passing entry in the Corporation Minutes that nonetheless confirms the structures were still considered worth maintaining into the early eighteenth century.

What makes the site quietly arresting is precisely this layering of invisibility and documentation. The ground at Dukesmeadows holds a building that was large enough to store thousands of barrels of grain, that served a castle of considerable strategic and political importance, and that was recorded in granular period detail, yet it survives now only as an anomaly in a geophysical plot. The Civil Survey description, published by Simington in 1934, remains one of the more evocative snapshots of a working castle precinct in mid-seventeenth-century Ireland.