Terryland Castle (in ruins), Terryland, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
On the eastern bank of the River Corrib, just outside Galway city, a fragment of a seventeenth-century house survives in a condition that is more suggestive than complete.
The southern end has been reduced almost entirely to foundations, but the northern gable stands intact, steeply pitched and finished with three diamond-shaped chimney stacks, an architectural flourish that gives the ruin a quietly distinctive profile against the sky. What remains is enough to read the ambition of the original building, and enough to raise questions that have not been fully answered.
The structure is a roughly rectangular two-storey house, measuring just over twenty-four metres in length and around ten and a half metres in external width, and it almost certainly sits on the footprint of an earlier castle on the same site. The surviving northern end of the west wall is particularly well-preserved, carrying a doorway flanked by four twin-lighted mullioned windows, each fitted with hood-mouldings, the small projecting drip-channels of stone above window openings that were designed to shed rainwater. Above these, traces of a gabled attic storey survive, and at the same level on the north-east and north-west corners, the corbels, small stone brackets projecting from the wall face, that once supported angle bartizans are still visible. Bartizans are the small overhanging turrets, typically round or square, that were common in later Irish tower houses and fortified residences; here their corbels hint at a building that straddled the line between domestic comfort and defensive posture. Inside, fireplaces remain in the north and east walls, and an oven is preserved in the north-east corner of the ground floor. Perhaps the most intriguing detail is a subtle offset in the line of the west wall, which suggests the building was not conceived or completed in a single campaign of construction but grew or was altered over time.
The ruins are in local authority care and sit close to the river on the edge of what is now an urban landscape. The north gable, with its diamond chimneys and mullioned windows, is the element most worth studying closely; it preserves a legible record of how a prosperous seventeenth-century household in the west of Ireland chose to present itself, somewhere between fortress and country house.