Buttevant Castle, Buttevant, Co. Cork

Four storeys of castellated stone rise with projecting towers, pointed ogee arches over blocked windows, and narrow loopholes cut into rendered walls, all the trappings of a medieval stronghold. Much of it is genuine thirteenth-century fabric, but the overall effect, the theatrical silhouette against the townscape, is a Georgian invention layered onto a real ruin.

The Earls of Barrymore built the original castle here in the thirteenth century, and enough of its stonework survives within the present structure to anchor the building's claim to antiquity. It was John Anderson, the man responsible for founding the town of Fermoy, who transformed the old castle into a mansion around 1810. Anderson was working within a fashion of the period for Gothic revival architecture, when landowners across Ireland and Britain took a taste for turrets, arrow loops, and hood-mouldings, dressing up their homes to look like something out of a medieval romance even as they fitted them with contemporary comforts. He extended the theme beyond the house itself, building a castellated flour mill next door that echoes the same crenellated silhouette. The entrance front he created is asymmetrical, with a taller four-storey tower to the west balanced by a shorter three-storey one to the east, and a single-storey porch between them dressed up with its own corner turrets and a limestone doorway shaped in an ogee arch, now blocked but still legible beneath its hood-moulding.

The wider setting has survived better than the house itself, which is now roofless and derelict. Outbuildings to the rear retain their rubble limestone walls, and the boundary wall carries the Gothic theme through to a brick carriage arch with a heavy timber door and a cross-shaped loop above it, plus its own castellated turrets. To the north, a gateway with cut limestone piers and cast-iron gates leads past a roofless gate lodge, a sequence of approach that would once have prepared visitors for the mansion beyond, and now instead frames a building left to decay behind its own elaborate stonework.