That such a feature exists within this landscape is itself a small puzzle, given how thoroughly the wider estate fell into ruin after the famine years stripped its original inhabitants of any means to maintain it.

Clifden Castle was the seat of the D'Arcy family, who founded the town of Clifden in the early nineteenth century. John D'Arcy, credited with establishing the town around 1812, built the castle as a Gothic Revival house overlooking Clifden Bay. The family's fortunes collapsed during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s, and the estate was eventually abandoned, leaving the castle roofless and the grounds to return gradually to the rough Connemara landscape around them. Within that wider context of decline, the survival of any deliberately designed element is a quiet curiosity, a trace of an ambition that the land itself largely swallowed.