Castle - tower house, Barrettstown, Co. Kildare
In the quiet pastures of Barrettstown, County Kildare, the crumbling remains of a tower house tell a story of centuries past.
Castle - tower house, Barrettstown, Co. Kildare
Though the structure vanished from Ordnance Survey maps between 1838 and 1910, its weathered stones still mark the spot where a fortified dwelling once stood. What survives today is the southwest corner of a two-storey vaulted building, measuring roughly 7 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west, with walls over a metre thick built from rubble masonry. Much of the original stonework has been robbed away over the years, leaving gaps where the vault once spanned and holes where facing stones were prised from both inner and outer walls.
The most intriguing feature is a small square stair tower, about 2 metres on each side, projecting from the western wall. A deep bar-slot hole in the tower’s northern wall reveals where a sturdy door once secured the entrance, whilst the ghostly outline of a spiral staircase can still be traced; though most steps at ground level have been removed, a few survive at first-floor level. A narrow loop window once lit these stairs, and the scarred stonework shows where a flat-arched window embrasure pierced the western wall at ground level. Running north from the stair tower, grass-covered foundation lines trace the northwest corner of what may have been a larger 17th-century fortified house that incorporated the older tower.
The patchwork of red brick visible on the first floor’s inner walls suggests this wasn’t simply abandoned after a single catastrophe but rather maintained and repaired over generations before finally falling into ruin. Today, these fragments stand in improved pasture land where even the old field boundaries shown on Victorian maps have been swept away, leaving the tower house remains as a solitary reminder of the defensive architecture that once dotted the Irish countryside.