Tully Castle, Tully, Co. Roscommon

A substantial fortified house once stood here on gently undulating ground, a two-storey rectangular structure measuring roughly 17.6 metres by 9 metres, fitted with circular corner towers carrying gun-loops at the north-west and south-west angles, and distinctive chimneys with diamond-shaped stacks at each gable. It was, by any account, a considerable building. When archaeologists tested the site in 2007, they found no physical evidence of it whatsoever.

The structure's history before its disappearance is almost as elusive as its remains. A castle at Tullagh, the earlier anglicised form of the name, had already been lost to Irish rebels by a man named Martin Lyle before 1596. By around 1636, when the Strafford map was produced as part of a survey of Connacht land ownership, no castle is clearly marked at this location, though there is some uncertainty about whether a nearby entry refers to the same building or to a structure now associated with the neighbouring Liberty townland. In the 1640s and again in the 1660s, the bishop of Meath held 62 profitable acres at Tullogh, but no castle is mentioned in those records, and no other landowner appears. The architectural details that survive in the historical literature, the gun-loops, the tower dimensions, the diamond stacks, suggest a late sixteenth or early seventeenth-century fortified house of some ambition, yet the building had slipped out of the documentary record long before it disappeared physically. What remained of the structure was removed in the early 1990s following storm damage, and when archaeologists excavated the location years later, they found the ground had kept no trace of what had stood there.