Carrigaphooca Castle

The site consists of a ruined five‑storey rectangular tower house set on a steep, jagged rock outcrop that overlooks the River Sullane and dominates the surrounding townlands of Lissacresig and Lower Shanballyshane. The walls are built of sandstone and limestone, creating a tall, compact defensive profile anchored to the rock beneath.

The interior circulation shows a clear sequence of stairs and chambers. A ground‑floor room is lit by small, off‑centre openings. A straight mural stone stair of eleven steps rises to the first floor, while a spiral stair provides vertical movement from the second to the fourth floors; the stairwell contains fifty‑four steps in total. The first floor is a single chamber that is described as likely used by guards. Floor timbers sat on carved limestone corbels that remain visible in the fabric.

Openings in the masonry include three deeply recessed windows on the ground level and a surviving window on the eastern face, positioned opposite the entrance to the second floor, which retains a simple lintelled or block head. The top storey has larger windows on its north and south walls; that upper level may have served as living quarters and possibly contained a fireplace, while the known lower floors are reported without one.

Defensive arrangements once extended beyond the main tower. Two corner bartizans remain in fragmentary form on opposite wall tops; these projecting stone encloses have small gaps that allowed defenders to fire downward along the face of the tower. The tower originally stood within two outer defensive walls, and records indicate those enclosing walls have left no traceable remains. The building survives as a ruin, with later conservation interventions from the 1970s evident in the added external flight of steps and a narrow stepped turret which provided access to a roof walk; that access was subsequently gated in the mid‑1980s. The tower occupies a landscape rich in prehistoric remains, with the Carrigaphooca Stone Circle located two fields to the east and a large standing stone to the west.