Reendisert Court, Ballylicky, Co. Cork

These are the projecting stone galleries, pierced with openings, through which defenders could drop stones or worse onto anyone approaching the door below. They mark this out as a fortified house rather than a simple dwelling, and their survival, even in decay, gives the ruin a defensive character quite different from the domestic buildings that grew up around it over the following centuries.

The house was built around 1620 by Owen O'Sullivan Beara, on a T-shaped plan of five bays, two storeys with an attic above and a basement below. It belongs to a period when Gaelic and Old English landowners across Munster were still building houses that combined comfort with the possibility of siege, a habit that proved well founded when the building was nearly destroyed during the Cromwellian campaigns of the 1650s. Rather than being abandoned after that violence, it was patched up and kept in use. Over time the two halves of the house took on different lives: the east end was refitted as a country residence, gentrified into something closer to conventional domestic architecture, while the west end was given over to farm buildings, with later additions to the rear and side reflecting that more workaday purpose. Remarkably, people continued to live in some part of the structure until the late twentieth century, meaning this seventeenth-century fortified house effectively remained inhabited for the better part of four hundred years before finally falling into ruin.

What remains today shows the layered history clearly enough for anyone willing to look. Square-headed window and door openings with concrete sills sit alongside the rubble limestone and rendered walls, some of which still carry patches of slate hanging, a weatherproofing technique of fixing slates vertically to exposed wall surfaces rather than only on the roof. The pitched roofs have gone, but their stone chimneystacks and cast-iron rainwater goods remain in place, silhouetted against the sky. A more recent concrete block wall now encloses the site on its east side, a modern boundary drawn around a building that has otherwise been left to weather quietly, its dominating position in the landscape unchanged since Owen O'Sullivan Beara first raised its walls.