Ardtarmon Castle, Ardtermon, Co. Sligo

This is a transitional form, built when defensive necessity was giving way to domestic comfort, and it shows in the details: square-headed windows with stone sills sit comfortably beside the pointed-arch doorway at the base of the south tower, itself framed in dressed limestone in a style more associated with medieval fortification than seventeenth-century living.

The core structure dates to around 1640, a period when many Irish landowning families were adapting older tower house traditions into something more habitable, retaining the vertical emphasis and enclosed bawn (a walled yard originally intended for security and livestock) while softening the interior arrangements for everyday use. The rubble stone boundary walls and gate piers that still front the property are a survival of that enclosed world, even as later additions have reshaped the building around them. A substantial seven-bay two-storey extension was added in the mid-1990s, complete with its own corner turret to the south-west, a deliberate echo of the original towers rather than a plain modern addition. Further renovation followed in the early 2000s, when the roof was replaced with artificial slate, lead caps were fitted to the conical tower roofs, and the hardwood doors and limestone steps at the main entrance were renewed. Despite these successive layers of change, the walls of the older castle portion remain in unpainted roughcast rising to their parapets, distinguishing them visually from the painted render of the newer wing, a quiet way of reading the building's history directly off its surfaces.

What survives today is a working residence rather than a ruin, which is part of what makes it worth attention: the roofline alone tells a story of continuity, with diagonally grouped chimneystacks at the south gable, dormer windows with lead ridges, and gable parapets all sitting above walls that have been rendered and re-rendered across nearly four centuries. The projecting stone string course running along the parapet is a small but telling detail, a horizontal band that would once have helped shed water from the upper walls and now serves mainly to mark the transition between the original fabric and its later reinforcements.