Ardtully House, Ardtully, Co. Kerry

It now stands roofless, its render weathering off the walls, having been burnt in 1921 and never rebuilt. The shell survives well enough to read the original design clearly: a five-bay entrance front to the south, gablets once rising over the first-floor windows, a flat-roofed porch reached by a flight of steps, and to one side a three-storey tower on a circular plan finished with battlements, answered further along by a corbelled turret, its upper section carried out on projecting stone courses rather than built up from the ground.

The house was one of many Irish country residences destroyed by fire during the revolutionary period around 1921, a fate shared by numerous landlord houses across the country in those years. What makes Ardtully unusual is the ground it stands on. The house was raised on the site of a medieval abbey, castle and towers, so the nineteenth-century Baronial towers and battlements were not simply decorative borrowings from a vague medieval past but were built above the actual remains of fortified and monastic structures that had once occupied the same spot. Around the ruin, evidence of the wider estate survives too: a rubble-built outbuilding of about 1850 to the north-west, since heavily altered for residential use, a walled enclosure to the north with a run of segmental-headed carriage arches, arched openings once used for coach access, and a long ten-bay outbuilding further north-east, also dating to around 1850 and now ruinous itself.

Details worth looking for in the fabric include the raised render quoins and limestone string courses that once articulated the walls into storeys, the apron panels beneath the first-floor windows, and the tripartite doorcase to the entrance, its swept-arched doorway flanked by sidelights and approached by limestone steps. On the west side a gabled oriel window with limestone mullions still projects from the wall, while the east elevation retains its own run of mullioned openings. Taken together, the standing walls, the outbuildings, and the carriage arches sketch the outline of a substantial estate complex built over, and in a sense in dialogue with, the older abbey and castle whose stones may well still lie beneath it.