Dromoland Castle, Dromoland, Co. Clare

What stands today was built around 1835, a full decade after an earlier house on the site had already been pulled down, so its crenellated parapets, machicolations and squat towers are not survivals of a medieval past but a deliberate, well-funded fiction of one. Bartizans (small overhanging corner turrets, usually associated with defensive architecture) sit alongside carved crests and finials purely for effect, and the cut-limestone walls, rusticated at the base, were dressed up with label mouldings over the windows to suggest a lineage the house did not literally have. Two towers, one circular and one square, rise to different heights and stages, giving the composition an asymmetry that reads as accumulated history rather than a single architect's plan, though it was exactly that.

The house was designed by the English brothers James and George Richard Pain, prolific architects of the Gothic Revival in early nineteenth century Ireland, working for the O'Brien family, whose earlier eighteenth century residence on the site had been demolished around 1826 by Sir Edward O'Brien. The Pains were replacing not just a building but a statement of continuity, since the O'Briens, who held the title Lord Inchiquin, wanted a seat that gestured towards the antiquity of their name. That gesture was made literal elsewhere on the grounds, where the gateway from Lemanagh Castle, a fortified house of around 1600 associated with the same family, was set into a walled garden as a genuine fragment of the older world the new castle was only imitating. The house remained in O'Brien hands until 1962, when it was sold by the sixteenth Lord Inchiquin and converted for use as a hotel, a change that preserved the building by giving it a new purpose rather than leaving it to decline as so many Irish country houses did in the twentieth century.

Approach is still marked by the trappings of a formal estate: a gate lodge with a Doric portico, cut limestone gate piers with fluted friezes, and cast iron gates, along with a folly and other landscape features scattered through the grounds. The rear of the house, less obviously composed than its public front, has its own porch and a polygonal turret reached by a flight of steps, worth seeking out for those who want to see how the architects handled the parts of the building not meant to impress from the avenue.