Foulksrath Castle, Foulksrath, Co. Kilkenny

What catches the eye first is the mixture of window styles cut into the same walls: narrow lancet slits, some paired with a stone mullion between them, sit alongside broader square-headed openings with timber sashes and shallow hood mouldings. The two treatments belong to different centuries, and the building wears both without apology, a tower house that has been lived in and altered rather than preserved as a ruin.

The tower was built in 1550, a fortified residence of the kind that dotted the Irish countryside as minor lords and gentry sought a defensible base combined with domestic comfort. Its narrow lancet windows and battered walls, thicker at the base for stability, belong to that original defensive logic. Around 1850 the building was reworked, likely by the landowning family of the day, in a manner typical of the period: rather than abandon the old tower for a new house, they cut larger sash windows into it, added a two-storey wing arranged around a courtyard, and softened the fortress into something closer to a country residence. This layering, medieval bones under a Victorian face, reflects a broader shift among landed families moving away from purely military architecture while remaining reluctant to demolish what stood before them. The site carries associations with the Wright and Ryan families, whose ownership shaped the building's later life. Attached to the property is a walled garden of the same 1850s renovation, its boundary probably built up from the stone of the original bawn, the defended enclosure that would have stood around the tower when it was first raised, entered today through a round-headed gateway with cut stone voussoirs and iron double gates.

The wing added in the Victorian remodelling has its own character, with paired pointed-arch windows at ground level and red brick surrounds framing the first-floor openings, a combination of limestone and brick that marks it out from the plainer tower behind. The main door sits in a pointed-arch recess reached by two stone steps, fitted with a tongue-and-groove timber door that has clearly seen long use. The building now operates as a guesthouse, set back from the road within its own grounds, which means the tower is not simply viewed from a distance but can be approached and, to some extent, entered and inhabited, a rare way to experience a structure of this age at close quarters.