Maguire's Castle, Toureen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
On the first Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland, drawn up in 1840, a modest early nineteenth-century house in Toureen, County Tipperary, was recorded with the rather grand label 'Maguire's Castle' and described in the accompanying Namebook as 'a habitable castle'.
By the time the second edition maps were produced between 1901 and 1905, the building had shrunk in cartographic significance to a smaller, unnamed structure. The owners today describe it as a former hunting lodge, which tells its own quiet story about how a place can travel from castle to lodge to footnote across a few generations.
The house was formerly part of the Charters Estate, and its early nineteenth-century construction places it in a period when the Ordnance Survey was itself a relatively new enterprise in Ireland, mapping the country in extraordinary detail for the first time. What makes the wider site particularly interesting is not the house itself but a ruinous building that stands directly opposite it in the grounds. Only the façade now survives, a long thin wall of roughly coursed rubble sandstone some 13.7 metres in length and just 2.6 metres deep, set against a northeast-facing slope and raised on a stone plinth nearly a metre high. Four small square windows punctuate the face at regular intervals, and the remains of a cat-slide roof, a roof that extends down at a lower pitch over a projecting porch, are still visible. Brick-lined flues survive at either end of the interior, and the evidence of openings near first-floor level suggests the structure was originally two storeys. This ruined building is associated with a large walled enclosure covering roughly one and a half acres, though the original purpose of the complex remains unrecorded.