Castle Garde, Castlegarde, Co. Limerick

Look further along the walls and the strangeness compounds: carved statues of Bacchus, Venus and Athene stand inside the gatehouse, and elsewhere on the parapets a carved gargoyle keeps watch. None of this quite belongs to any single period, and that is rather the point.

The complex began under the O'Briens, with a five-storey square-plan tower house raised around 1198, the kind of fortified stone tower that Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords alike built across the Irish countryside as both residence and defence. What stands today is very much a layered building: the medieval tower was joined, in the early 1800s, to a new country house commissioned by Waller O'Grady, son of Standish O'Grady, and designed by the architect brothers James and George Richard Pain. Rather than simply attaching a modern residence to an old tower, the Pains built in deliberate conversation with the medieval fabric, adding crenellated parapets, label mouldings and cross loop openings, the narrow slit windows once used for archers, to make the nineteenth-century work echo the castle's older character. A circular keep and gate lodge with corbelled battlements extend the same idea, while a bawn wall, the defensive enclosure that would once have protected a tower house and its yard, runs around the whole site with its own crenellations and carved towers. The stonework tells the story of this layering plainly enough: the rougher, battered limestone of the tower base contrasts with the more carefully dressed and carved limestone of the Pains' additions, including a limestone arch gateway leading through to the house itself.

What makes Castle Garde worth lingering over is this coherence across four centuries. Round-headed windows with label mouldings sit above a four-light ground-floor opening, timber sliding sash windows share elevations with pointed arch doorways in cut limestone surrounds, and geometrical tracery appears in the tower's square-headed openings. The gate lodge, with its circular plan and lattice-glazed loop windows beneath hoodmouldings, extends the architectural vocabulary of the main house right out to the edge of the site, so that arrival and approach are part of the same designed experience as the building itself.