Inishcrone Castle, Inishcrone, Co. Sligo

It is the kind of ruin that looks, from a distance across the farmland that surrounds it, more intact than it actually is, until you get close enough to see daylight through the east wall that simply is not there any more.

The building dates from around 1650, placing it at the tail end of the fortified house tradition in Ireland, a style that sits between the medieval tower house and the more open, comfort-minded country house that followed. These transitional structures kept some of the defensive vocabulary, thick rubble stone walls, square-headed windows and doors with flat arches formed from roughly cut stone voussoirs, while abandoning the pure verticality of the tower house for a more rectangular, family-sized footprint. Here that footprint was three bays wide and two storeys high, with circular corner towers at the north-west and south-west angles giving it a faintly castellated silhouette even though its purpose by this date was as much domestic as martial. Inside, the floors are long gone, but the chimney breast on the west gable survives at a scale that suggests a substantial hearth, and the steep pitch of the vanished roof can still be traced in the stonework of that same gable end.

The site itself does much of the work in explaining why anyone chose to build here in the first place. It sits on ground high enough to look out over Killala Bay to the west, a position that would have given whoever lived here early warning of anything approaching by sea, as well as a degree of exposure to the weather that has clearly taken its toll over the intervening centuries. Approached across open farmland, the ruin reads first as a silhouette, towers and chimney breaking the skyline, before the missing wall and empty floors reveal just how much of the structure time and weather have carried away.