Portlick Castle, Portlick, Co. Westmeath

The original medieval block, built around 1500, still carries its machicolation chute, a stone projection above the old entrance through which defenders could drop missiles or worse on anyone unwelcome at the door, and its walls are pierced by narrow loop holes rather than proper windows. Butted onto this severe core is a seven-bay Georgian range from around 1800, all rendered walls and regular square-headed openings, and beyond that again a castellated block of 1865 with mullioned windows, hoodmouldings and dressed limestone trim that borrows the vocabulary of the tower house without quite pretending to be medieval. The result reads less like a single building than a cross-section through changing taste, one wing at a time.

The Dillon family built the tower house and held it for close to two centuries, until 1696, when Portlick passed to the Crown following the political upheavals of that decade and was granted to Thomas Keightly, a member of King William's privy council in Ireland. It did not stay with him long. By around 1700 it had been sold to William Palmer of Dublin, who sold it on almost immediately to the Smyth family of Barbavilla House near Collinstown, and it was the Smyths who held Portlick into the twentieth century. The building's present layered appearance owes a great deal to misfortune rather than fashion alone: a fire in 1861 gutted much of the existing interior, and the castellated extension of around 1865 was built in direct response, replacing what had been lost while giving the castle a new, more picturesque face toward the southwest. A further extension was added to the northeast end around 1990, by which time the building had begun its life as an hotel.

Around the main block stands a substantial cluster of rubble limestone outbuildings arranged around a courtyard, along with a detached coach house and stables to the south, both of which help explain the working scale of the estate that once surrounded the castle. Portlick itself occupies a peninsula on the eastern shore of Lough Ree, with its main entrance gates set to the east and mature grounds running down toward the water, a setting that has clearly shaped the choice, over the centuries, to keep building on rather than starting again elsewhere.