The combination is an odd one: a garrison bolted onto a tower house, the whole arrangement sitting on a wooded peninsula in Lough Leane. What makes it stranger still is how the military use reshaped the older building from the inside out, and how thoroughly those changes were later undone.

When the writer Smith visited in 1752, he found the barracks newly built and already garrisoned. A decade or so later, Weld, writing in 1812, noted that the officer appointed governor of the complex had received the post as a reward for services to the Crown during events in New Ross, Co. Wexford, a detail that ties this Kerry outpost to the upheavals of the late eighteenth century. The military occupation left its mark on the original tower house, a form of fortified residence common across medieval Ireland, in ways that were both practical and destructive. The antechambers on the north side of the main chambers were removed, the vault over the first floor was taken out, and sash windows were cut into the east wall at ground and first floor level. A three-storey extension was added to the south side of the tower. By 1825 the barracks had gone out of use, and the complex began to decay in earnest. Attempts to stabilise the tower in the years that followed left their own layered traces: metal ties, internal walls propping a collapsing vault, a large buttress built against the north-west corner, and eventually a concrete roof set on metal beams. The tower was taken into state care in 1970, and a programme of conservation followed that involved stripping out the various military and post-military interventions and rebuilding the antechambers that had been lost. The structure opened to visitors in 1993.