Drimnagh Castle, Long Mile Road, Drimnagh, Dublin 12, Co. Dublin

Rarer still is the fact that people were living inside the walls until 1954, which makes the building one of the oldest continuously occupied structures in Ireland. Most castles of this age have long since become ruins, museum pieces, or picturesque shells. This one kept its roof on and its fires lit for the better part of seven centuries.

The land came into the hands of Hugh de Berneval in 1215, and the building that stands today grew up in stages over thd following centuries rather than arriving in a single burst of construction. The oldest surviving fabric is the fourteenth-century undercroft, a vaulted stone chamber at ground level that would originally have served for storage, its ceiling still bearing the faint impressions of wicker centering, the woven timber framework used to support the stone while the vault was being built and then left to rot away once it had set. Above this rose the great hall and gallery, while a square, four-storey tower was added to the south in the sixteenth century by the Loftus family, its lookout turrets and loop windows speaking to a period when a landowner still needed to think about defence. The eighteenth century brought softer additions: a gabled stone entrance porch and steps built around 1780, along with a walled garden and entrance bridge, all signalling a country where prosperity had begun to outweigh the need for fortification. As Dublin's suburbs crept outward, the fields around the castle became Drimnagh and Walkinstown, and a school was built on the grounds around 1960, sitting oddly alongside a building whose origins predate the city's expansion by many centuries.

Inside, the layers of use are still legible if you know where to look. The undercroft retains a sixteenth-century hearth, smoke chamber, and bain marie, a shallow water bath once used for keeping food warm, evidence that a working kitchen operated at this level long after its original storage function had passed. Upstairs, the great hall has a seventeenth-century hearth beneath a reconstructed oak truss roof, and stone staircases at the south and north-east corners still carry the visitor between the two principal levels much as they always did. The castle underwent extensive renovation in the 1980s through a local community project, which replaced roofing, reconstructed window tracery, and rebuilt sections of the parapet and chimneys, but did so without erasing the earlier stonework beneath, so that fourteenth-century masonry and twentieth-century repair sit side by side rather than one replacing the other.