Ballycurrin House, Ballycurrin Demesne, Co. Mayo

It is a single-bay, two-stage structure, disused now, its purpose more decorative than functional even in its working life. Follies of this kind, ornamental buildings raised to enhance a designed landscape rather than to serve any practical function, are not unusual on Irish demesnes, but few take quite this shape, and fewer still carry the layered puzzle of dates that this one does.

The tower is generally said to belong to the late eighteenth century, part of the improvements carried out on the Ballycurrin House estate, and a date stone reading "1772" on the neighbouring boathouse has long been taken as supporting evidence. But the lighthouse does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey map, surveyed in 1838 and published in 1840, which would be a curious omission if it had already stood for six decades. A second date stone on the tower itself reads "1847", and this figure sits far more comfortably with the mapping evidence. That date places its construction not in an era of Georgian landscaping confidence but in the depths of the Great Famine, the catastrophic famine of 1845 to 1849 that devastated much of rural Ireland, County Mayo among the worst affected counties in the country. A folly raised at that moment, whatever its stated purpose, sits within a well documented pattern of famine relief works, where landowners commissioned ornamental or infrastructural building projects partly to provide paid labour to a starving tenantry. The tower was erected by Charles Lynch, a deputy lieutenant of the county who died in 1897, and it remains one of the more distinctive pieces of mid nineteenth-century built heritage in south Mayo, its lakeside setting giving it a theatrical quality quite removed from its grim historical backdrop.

The discrepancy between the two date stones is itself worth lingering on. A building that wears an eighteenth-century date but was, on the physical evidence of the maps, actually built in the depths of the Famine raises the question of why an earlier date would be inscribed at all, whether through confusion, romantic embellishment, or a wish to distance the structure from the hardship of its actual construction. Standing on its pier, jutting into Lough Corrib with the pale outline of a real lighthouse but none of its function, the tower is a small, quiet monument to that ambiguity, as much about what people wanted their landscape to say as about any lake traffic it was ever built to guide.