Turrets, Coolnamony Lower, Co. Laois
On the eastern side of the Glenlahan valley in the Slieve Bloom mountains, the remnants of a seventeenth-century fortified house and bawn tell a story of defensive architecture from Ireland's turbulent past.
Turrets, Coolnamony Lower, Co. Laois
The site sits on slightly elevated ground near the eastern bank of the Glenlahan river, with an early stone bridge to the west providing access across the water. This bridge likely dates to the same period as the house itself, around the early 1600s, when such fortified residences were essential for protection during uncertain times.
The bawn, a defensive wall that once enclosed a substantial rectangular courtyard measuring 63 metres east to west and 47 metres north to south, survives in varying states of preservation. Its western wall stands most complete at approximately 2.5 metres high, constructed from roughly coursed sandstone rubble. This wall features three splayed gun loops and evidence of square mural towers; one at the northwest corner and another positioned off-centre along the southern section. These towers, which projected about a metre beyond the outer wall face, contained gun loops that provided flanking fire along the external walls. The better-preserved southern tower measures just over 2.3 by 2.4 metres internally, whilst only the western wall of the northwest tower remains standing.
Today, nineteenth-century farm buildings cross the centre of the former courtyard, including a five-bay farmhouse built directly atop the original seventeenth-century house that once formed the eastern side of the bawn. The northern and southern bawn walls survive only partially, with the northern section rebuilt in places during the Victorian era and the southern wall now incorporated into field boundaries. Archaeological evidence suggests there may have been a third gun tower along the northern wall and possibly an original gateway near the northwest corner, though both are now destroyed. A later gap, nearly three metres wide, was knocked through the western wall, whilst the original bawn wall would have run from the southern gable of the house and returned westward towards the river, completing the defensive rectangle.





