Rising 51 feet high on elevated ground in County Limerick, this four-storey tower house measures 26 feet by 14 feet and features walls four feet thick. The structure includes a perfect spiral staircase tucked into the northeast corner, complete with a distinctive keyhole-shaped loop window, whilst the entrance passage leads through to vaulted chambers above. Architectural historians have classified it as a Type 1A tower house, where the ground floor entrance opens into a lobby that cleverly separates access between the main chamber, a subsidiary room, and the corner staircase.

The castle’s history weaves through centuries of Irish land ownership and conflict. Originally held by the O’Brien family in the late fifteenth century, specifically Brien Duff who controlled what was then called Ballynveylie Castle, it later passed through various hands during the tumultuous seventeenth century. By the time of the 1654-56 Civil Survey, Barnaby Earl of Thomond owned the property, though the surveyors rather dismissively noted it as merely ‘a stump of a Castle and a smale Orcharde’. The estate was subsequently leased to Margaret mac Canna in 1622 and eventually confirmed to Arthur Upton in 1669, reflecting the complex patterns of land transfer that characterised post-Cromwellian Ireland.

What makes Ballinveala particularly intriguing is the ghost of the building that once stood alongside it; a structure known simply as ‘the Court’. Though this western addition has long since vanished, its presence is still etched in stone, with bond stones projecting from the tower’s west wall like skeletal fingers marking where the two buildings once joined. The main 8-metre wide tower was apparently never completed by the O’Briens, yet the surviving eastern portion remained inhabited well into the late nineteenth century, with wooden floors still intact as late as 1874. Today, visitors can still explore the entrance passage and imagine ascending the spiral stair to the vaulted upper chambers, where narrow loop windows once watched over the surrounding Limerick countryside.