‘Castle-Caulfield owes its erection to Sir Toby Caulfield, afterwards Lord Charlemont – a distinguished English soldier who had fought in Spain and the Low Countries in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and commanded a company of one hundred and fifty men in Ireland in the war with O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, at the close of her reign. For these services he was rewarded by the Queen with a grant of part of Tyrone’s estate, and other lands in the province of Ulster; and on King James’s accession to the British crown, was honoured with knighthood and made governor of the fort of Charlemont, and of the counties of Tyrone and Armagh. At the plantation of Ulster he received further grants of lands, and among them a thousand acres called Ballydonnelly, or O’Donnelly’s town, in the barony of Dungannon, on which, in 1614, he commenced the erection of the mansion subsequently called Castle-Caulfield. This mansion is described by Pynnar in his Survey of Ulster in 1618-19, in the following words…’

‘…“Sir Toby Caulfield hath one thousand acres called Ballydonnell (recte Ballydonnelly), whereunto is added beside what was certified by Sir Josias Bodley, a fair house or castle, the front whereof is eighty feet in length and twenty-eight feet in breadth from outside to outside, two cross ends fifty feet in length and twenty-eight feet in breadth; the walls are five feet thick at the bottom, and four at the top, very good cellars under ground and all the windows are of hewn stone. Between the two cross ends there goeth a wall, which is eighteen feet high and maketh a small court within the building. This work at this time is but thirteen feet high, and a number of men at work for the sudden finishing of it. There is also a stone bridge over the river, which is of lime and stone, with strong buttresses for the supporting of it. And to this is joined a good water-mill for corn, all built of lime and stone. This is at this time the fairest building I have seen. Near unto this Bawne is built a town, in which there is fifteen English families, who are able to make twenty men with arms.”
The ruins of this celebrated mansion seem to justify the the opinion expressed by Pynnar, that it was the fairest building he had seen, that is, in the counties of the Plantation, for there are no existing remains of any house erected by the English or Scottish undertakers equal to it in architectural style. It received, however, from the second Lord Charlemont, the addition of a large gate-house with towers, and also of a strong keep or donjon…’

‘…That Ballydonnelly was truly, as we have stated, the ancient name of the place, and that it was the patrimonial residence of the chief of that ancient family, previously to the plantation of Ulster, must be sufficiently indicated by the authorities we have already adduced; but if any doubt on this fact could exist, it would be removed by the following passage in an unpublished Irish MS. Journal of the Rebellion of 1641 in our own possession, from which it appears that, as usual with the representatives of the dispossessed Irish families on the breaking out of that unhappy conflict, the chief of the O’Donnellys seized upon the Castle-Caufield mansion as of right his own:-
“October 1641. Lord Caulfield’s castle in Ballydonnelly (Baile I Donghoile) was taken by Patrick Moder (the gloomy) O’Donnelly.”
The Lord Charlemont, with his family, was at that time absent from his home in command of the garrison of Charlemont, and it was not his fate ever to see it afterwards; he was treacherously captured in his fortress about the same period by the cruel Sir Phelim O’Neill, and was barbarously murdered while under his protection, if not, as seems the fact, by his direction, on the 1st of March following. Nor was this costly and fairest house of its kind in “the north” ever after inhabited by any of his family: it was burned in those unhappy “troubles” and left the melancholy, though picturesque memorial of sad events which we now see it.’  

Extracts from The Irish Penny Journal, Saturday, January 9, 1841, Number 28, Volume 1