Dungulph Castle, Dungulph, Co. Wexford

That batter, a deliberate outward flare at the base of the wall, is a defensive holdover from an era when a house needed to shrug off more than weather. Look closer and the proportions confirm it. There is far more solid wall than window, and what windows exist are recessed behind heavy block-and-start surrounds with hood mouldings, as though the building were still not quite convinced the danger had passed. A round turret at one corner, its stages rising through three storeys, completes the impression of a structure built to watch as much as to shelter.

That impression is not misplaced. The core of the building is the shell of a seventeenth-century fortified house, and in 1642 it was held by Walter Whitty against an assault by Royalist forces under a Lieutenant Treviscoe, a small, sharp episode of the wider conflict that convulsed Ireland in that decade. The house did not escape later turmoil either. In 1798, it was destroyed in reprisal for the support the Devereux brothers had given to that year's insurrection, one of many country houses across Wexford to suffer for the politics of their owners. It stood as a ruin, presumably, until 1917, when Michael Cloney rebuilt it, folding a working house back into the old shell rather than starting again. The doorcase and the general handling of solid mass against opening recall other fortified houses of the region, among them a hall house at Fethard and the sixteenth-century castle at Enniscorthy, suggesting the 1917 restoration was working consciously within a local architectural vocabulary rather than inventing one from scratch. The building's later history is tied to the Cloney family, including Seán Cloney and his wife Sheila Cloney, whose name is associated with the house into the second half of the twentieth century.

The grounds still carry small signs of continuity with that layered past: ivy-covered piers at the perimeter, their capping now overgrown, hold a wrought-iron farm gate, a modest but telling detail of a place that has moved from siege to farmhouse without ever quite discarding the architecture of the first phase.