The earliest recorded mention of the castle is to be found in the Tithe Applotment Book of 1827, where John Lloyd Esq., 'of the Castle' is listed as paying tithes on parcels of land amounting to around 122 acres, plantation measure. It was apparently fairly imposing by the mid-1830s as Lewis' Topographical Dictionary, published in 1837, described it as 'a handsome castellated building.' But John apparently continued to add to the structure, as the O'Donovan letters, dated 1841; state that Mr Lloyd was 'now building a new castle.' The police barracks across the road from the castle entrance was built sometime after 1836, and is first mentioned in the rate book of 1842. It is also shown in the OS map of 1841.

The castle is a battlemented Tudor-style structure, with side turrets, and a central machicolated turret enclosing the main doorway. Such castle-like structures in revivalist styles were in vogue in that early Victorian period. Lisheen is a more modest version of the impressive castellated residences built in the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Charleville, near Tullamore, designed by Francis Johnston, Castle Bernard, near Kinnity, Co Offaly, Blackrock Castle, Cork, designed by James and George Richard Pain, and Glenstal, near Murroe, now a Benedictine Abbey.

John and Catherine had a family of at least five. As already mentioned, his first child, Charles Henry, was born in 1821. John was appointed a magistrate, and as such took Archdeacon Rev Henry Cotton, the rector of the Church of Ireland parish of Thurles, to task for criticising the local magistrates in a letter to a Dublin newspaper, alleging an unwillingness on their part to play a more positive role in the matter of the collection of the tithes. There is an exchange of letters on the part of both of them in the Tipperary Free Press of 1832, when the Tithe War was at its most tense period in Thurles and its neighbourhood. Lloyd signed his letters as simply as John Lloyd, Lisheen.

The next we hear of him is as involved in committees as the distress of the Great Famine first began to reach alarming proportions in the course of 1846. At a public meeting in April in Thurles courthouse called to devise means of creating employment for the labouring classes, and to urge landowners to subscribe to such employment projects, and towards a fund to procure food for the destitute, John Lloyd was appointed on a committee to carry out the objectives of the meeting. All the other JPs in the Thurles Union were on the committee, as was Archbishop Slattery, and Archdeacon Cotton, and the other parish clergy.

At a later meeting in the town John Lloyd proposed that a committee of the clergy of all denominations, the magistrates, and the Poor Law Guardians, be appointed in each parish for ascertaining what employment projects in each of them would be beneficial both to the labourers and their localities. He was appointed chairman of the Moyne Relief Committee, which was set up in August 1846. Towards the close of that year the parish priest, Fr Patrick Larkin, wrote to Dublin stating that the poor in the parish were in 'an awful state of destitution', and that he feared an outbreak when the public works would come to an end. There were five public works schemes going on in the parish in that winter of 1846/47, and the relief committee was praised in the Tipperary Vindicator for its efficiency.

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