Ballyportry Castle, Ballyportry South, Co. Clare

The four-stage structure, battered at the base so that its walls thicken toward the ground for stability, rises with a castellated parapet fitted with machicolations, projecting stone galleries with openings in the floor through which defenders could drop stones or worse onto anyone attempting to breach the entrance below.

The castle's openings mix pointed arches and square heads, all finished with cut stone dressings, and the main door is set within a chamfered arch, its edges bevelled off in the manner typical of the period, fitted with a timber panelled door that has clearly been maintained rather than merely preserved. Surrounding the tower is a rubble stone bawn wall, the term for the fortified enclosure that once protected livestock and outbuildings attached to a tower house, here fitted with gunloop slits for defending the perimeter and two turrets set diametrically opposite each other, added around 1625 as the building's defensive needs evolved into the following century. By the twentieth century the castle had passed into the hands of architect Bob Brown, who restored it during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, a project that returned the tower to habitable use as a private house while retaining its cut-stone quoins, steel-framed windows fitted within the older stone surrounds, and the inset plaque that marks its history on the exterior.

The steel gate now guarding the bawn's entrance is a modern concession to security rather than a medieval survival, but it sits within stonework old enough to have watched over the site for four centuries. What makes Ballyportry worth lingering on is less any single feature than the accumulation of them: a slated roof sitting atop rubble walls raised in the 1530s, wall paintings clinging on where damp and time usually erase them first, and a domestic life still being lived inside a structure built for defence rather than comfort.