Leap Castle, Leap, Co. Offaly

One wing of this tower house stands roofed and lived in, its castellated parapet intact, while another section a few metres away is derelict, open to the weather, the two halves of the same structure existing in entirely different states of repair. A diagonal chimneystack, oddly placed against the tower's older stonework, marks where a Jacobean house once stood before the whole place was set alight in 1558 to keep it from falling into Elizabethan hands. It is a building that has been rebuilt, added to, damaged and rebuilt again so many times that walking around it means walking through several centuries at once.

The castle was raised in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century as the principal seat of the O'Carrolls of Ely, chosen for its elevated position with views down across the valley to the Fuarawn River, useful for a family that needed to see trouble coming. After the 1558 burning it was rebuilt with a Jacobean house to its north, and by the mid seventeenth century it had passed out of O'Carroll hands entirely: John Darby, an English officer, married Finnola O'Carroll, and the estate became the Darby family's. It was the Darbys who gave the castle much of the character visible today. Around 1760, Jonathan Darby remodelled it with flanking castellated bays in a Neo-Gothic style, Georgian Gothic windows, and a sandstone door surround in the Batty Langley manner, an eighteenth-century decorative style that borrowed medieval Gothic details, pointed arches, clustered colonnettes and hoodmouldings, for fashionable rather than defensive effect. That doorway, with its pointed arch and sidelights, is still considered the most artistically accomplished part of the building. The Darbys remained until 1922, when the castle was burnt again, this time by the family itself as they left during the upheavals of that year, and it stood as a ruin for decades afterwards.

The building was eventually bought around thirty years ago and restoration work has continued since, though unevenly: the tower house and its southern flanking bay now serve as a private dwelling, while the two and three-storey castellated bays to the north remain derelict. Studying the sequence of construction here, tower house, Jacobean addition, Georgian Gothic remodelling, twentieth-century destruction and partial repair, amounts to a fairly compact lesson in how Irish country houses evolved, layer upon layer, rather than appearing fully formed in any one era.