At Oiligh in County Mayo, a decorative tower once stood roughly mid-way along the eastern stretch of an estate wall, and it is now completely gone, leaving not so much as a foundation course. The interest lies not in what survives but in what the record implies: that someone, at the turn of the twentieth century, thought a demesne wall deserved architectural embellishment on a considerable scale.

The tower was one of five that punctuated the estate walls surrounding Bingham Castle. Built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, these structures were ornamental rather than defensive, the kind of Gothic or castellated flourish that Victorian and Edwardian landowners favoured to lend their properties an air of antiquity and consequence. The Bingham family, after whom the castle takes its name, were a prominent Anglo-Irish dynasty in Mayo, and the estate at Oiligh reflected that ambition for visual grandeur. Of the five towers that once embellished the walls, this particular example was demolished in the early twentieth century, and nothing visible remains above ground today.