Castletown House, Cottlestown, Co. Sligo

The walls still carry substantial patches of their original lime render, the pale coating that would once have covered the whole structure, and inside there is timber work that may date to the same build. For a rubble stone tower house of this age to retain both is unusual; render tends to weather away within a generation or two, and interior woodwork rarely survives roof loss at all.

The building itself is a rectangular block of four bays and three storeys, its walls of random rubble limestone still partly roughcast. Corbelled chimneystacks rise from the east and west gables, rendered over in the same finish as the walls below. The south elevation carries a slightly projecting parapet with a bartizan, a small overhanging turret typically used for observation or defence, at its south-east corner; a concrete tank inserted into it around 1940 marks a much later, practical reuse of the space. A second bartizan occupies the north-west corner, its corbels cut to a point rather than rounded. Cut stone dressings run along the parapet as a string course, and the base of the walls is battered, meaning it slopes outward toward the ground for added stability, a common defensive feature of the period. Square-headed windows light the upper floors, their reveals rendered and their sills cut from stone, while the ground floor keeps its narrow defensive slits, chamfered and fitted with hood moulds to throw off rainwater. Entry was through a segmental-arched opening in the east gable, with a plainer square-headed opening on the south side.

The house does not stand alone. A rubble stone wall runs from its south-west corner to link up with the north wall of a corn mill just to the south, tying the tower house into a wider working landscape rather than leaving it isolated as a purely defensive folly. Grass now surrounds the structure, and the roof is long gone, but the combination of surviving render, timber, and the full defensive vocabulary, bartizans, slit openings, battered base, hood moulds, makes this one of the more legible fortified houses of its type still standing.