Rather than a real castle this was a tower house or family house for a family of merchants of Italian origins.
Their main businesses were the wool trading and money borrowing or banking.
The current tower house dates 15th or 16th century but it is possible that an earlier building was in its place. The tower house stands at the corner of a grid pattern of the medieval town so the building was erected at the beginning of the settlement.
At the end of the Williamite War it was granted to Colonel John Gifford. At that time it had two acres of land behind the castle called the gardens and one acre of land as an orchard.
After 1750 it was turned into a Protestant school and it served this function until 1820.
Today all that remains is the wall facing the street with a square tower at the north (10°) end. It has a very dull appearance and is not very inspiring.
The informative sign next to the castle has a very bad error in its text. It says that the term Lombard indicates a group of merchants who followed the Normans into Ireland and they were mostly from the city of Lucca, in Lombardy, a region in the northern Italy. As a matter of fact Lucca is in Tuscany, in central Italy. I think they mistook it with Lecco which is in Lombardy.
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