Carnew Castle, Main Street, Carnew, Co. Wicklow

The effect is unintentional but striking: a building that looks, in patches, like it is being slowly undressed by weather and time, its castellated parapet and bartizan (a small turret corbelled out from the wall, typically at a corner, once useful for covering the approach below) still intact even as the render falls away in sheets.

The tower house dates to the late 16th century, one of many such fortified residences raised across the Irish countryside in that period as minor lords and planters sought defensible homes that doubled as status symbols. Carnew's history since then has been one of interruption and adaptation rather than continuous use. The castle fell into disuse during the later 17th and early 18th century, standing roofless and presumably decaying for decades, until the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam had it re-roofed in the early 19th century, a rescue that presumably accounts for much of the building's present form. It went on to serve as a rectory at some point in the 19th century, housing a clergyman rather than a garrison, before passing, after the Second World War, into use as a private home, which it remains.

The building's architectural details reward a slow look rather than a quick one. The front door sits recessed within a gothic-arched opening with a moulded stone surround, and this gothic influence recurs unevenly across the building, some window openings are flat-headed while others carry pointed gothic arches, suggesting alterations layered on over different periods rather than a single design campaign. To the south is a projecting three-storey bay with a curved profile, and to the north-west the bartizan turret adds a further defensive flourish, more symbolic than practical by the time it was last altered. The roof itself is invisible from ground level, tucked entirely behind the castellated parapet, so that the building reads from a distance as a solid crenellated block rather than a house with a pitched roof at all. The boundary wall is worth pausing at too: tall and castellated to match the tower house, it incorporates lean-to stables built in the early 19th century, structures that have since been part rebuilt, altered, and extended, meaning the wall carries its own smaller history of patchwork repair running alongside that of the castle it screens.