Athlumney Castle, Convent Road, Navan, Co. Meath

What stands today is really two buildings knitted together: a three-stage tower house raised around 1500, and a later four-bay, three-storey extension added roughly a century and a half afterwards. The extension is the more domestic-looking of the two, with mullioned windows, divided by stone bars into smaller panes, and gables rising to tall chimney stacks, a design that speaks of a household more interested in comfort and show than defence by the mid-1600s.

That comfort was short-lived. The castle was burnt in 1649, the same year Cromwell's campaign swept through the Boyne valley and took Drogheda a few miles downstream. Tower houses like the original fifteenth or sixteenth century core at Athlumney were built as fortified residences for landed families, thick-walled and vertical, with living quarters stacked above a defensible ground floor; the seventeenth century extension shows how, in more settled decades, such families began building outward and upward for space and light rather than purely for safety. The fire that followed reversed that confidence, leaving the walls standing but hollow, the roof gone, the rubble stonework exposed to the weather ever since.

The ruin is now held as a National Monument in state care, its rubble walls still legible enough to trace the join between the older tower and the grander extension beside it, a rare chance to see two different centuries of domestic building sitting wall to wall, one bristling and defensive, the other reaching for elegance just before it was lost to fire.