Ashford Castle, Conga [Cong], Co. Galway

A late medieval gatehouse of around 1500, its paired square towers flanking a gated curtain wall, sits at the north-west corner; walk east and you pass through a fortified enclave added in 1589, a French chateau-style block of 1715 with dormer attics and an eagle finial on its roofline, and a pair of Victorian mock-medieval insertions from 1852, one of them a five-storey tower house. The east wing was rebuilt again in 1868, and a further phase of work in the 1970s added to the west while renovating the whole structure. Crenellated parapets, corbelled bartizans (small overhanging turrets, usually corbelled out from a wall for observation or defence) and a scatter of round and square towers run the length of the building, many of them concealing chimneystacks and roof lines rather than announcing them, so that the castle reads less as one design than as an argument between several centuries that somehow settled itself.

The land came into Anglo-Norman hands in 1228 under the de Burgo family, and it stayed within a network of ownership and conflict for the following three and a half centuries. In 1589 it passed to the Bingham family after a period of serious dispute, and it was the Binghams who added the fortified enclave that still partly survives, in some form, within the current south-west block. The eighteenth century brought the French-style block with its rendered walls and stone-eagle dormer; the Victorian period brought the tower house, the coats of arms carved into the south-west wing, and a reworking of the east wing's carriageway, which shifted the entrances from their original positions and left a set of cast-iron gates relocated to a new porch at the north-east corner. What survives is a limestone record of successive owners each altering the fabric to suit their own idea of what a castle should look like, medieval defence giving way to Georgian formality, and that in turn giving way to Victorian romantic revivalism.

Details reward slow looking rather than a quick circuit. The window openings shift in character from block to block, trefoil-headed and lancet openings on the older sections, square-headed sashes on the eighteenth-century ranges, and the sequence of doorways is worth tracing on its own: a pointed arch gate at the 1500 block still carries a carved mask at its keystone, and the porch at the north elevation has a shouldered pointed arch with a tympanum over its timber door. The grounds extend around a shallow ha-ha to the south, a sunken ditch designed to keep grazing animals off the lawn without a visible fence breaking the view, and a bridge provides access from the east. Cast-iron double-spout water hydrants are dotted through the grounds, small utilitarian survivals easy to miss.