Where a nineteenth-century house now stands, there once stood a castle that met its fiery end around 1820. The original fortification was no modest structure; contemporary sketches reveal it comprised three towers, two square and one circular, connected by intervening buildings that likely formed part of the bawn wall. These towers rose approximately four storeys high, topped with crenellated battlements and featuring flat-headed windows framed by hood-mouldings, suggesting they served as integral defensive elements of the bawn mentioned in the Civil Survey of 1654-6.

Following the castle’s destruction by fire, the landowner conceived an extraordinarily ambitious replacement scheme: a full-scale replica of Warwick Castle, one of England’s most impressive medieval fortresses. Construction began on this grand vision, but tragedy struck when the landowner died unexpectedly, leaving the project forever incomplete. What might have been Ireland’s most audacious architectural folly instead became a footnote in local history, with only the foundations of unfulfilled dreams buried beneath the current Victorian house.

The site represents a fascinating convergence of different historical periods; from its origins as a defended bawn in the seventeenth century or earlier, through its incarnation as a tower house complex, to its near-transformation into an English castle replica, and finally its current form as a nineteenth-century residence. Each layer tells part of the story of changing fortunes, architectural fashions, and the sometimes precarious nature of grand ambitions in rural Ireland.