Ireland's most picturesque and popular castles

Ireland has more castles per square mile than almost anywhere in Europe, and the reason is not romantic. It was contested ground for five hundred years, and every phase of that contest (Norman invasion, Gaelic resurgence, Tudor conquest, plantation) left fortified buildings behind. They run from Norman keep to Victorian folly and from roofless shell to working hotel, a range that carries across the Irish Sea to the English estates now let as venues, among them the De Vere Horsley Estate.

Blarney Castle

Blarney is the one everybody has heard of, and the tower is better than its reputation. What survives is a fifteenth-century keep built by the MacCarthys, with walls thick enough at the base to carry five storeys, and the machicolation at the top from which the famous stone is reached. The gardens around it (a poison garden, a fern garden and a substantial arboretum) are the part regular visitors come back for.

Bunratty and the reconstructed interior

Bunratty, in County Clare, is the best place in Ireland to understand how a tower house was actually lived in. The building is fifteenth-century; the interior is a twentieth-century reconstruction furnished with a collected assemblage of medieval and early modern pieces. Purists object, and they have a point, but the reconstruction answers questions that an empty shell never can: where people slept, how the hall was heated, how narrow the private rooms really were.

Cahir and the honest ruin

Cahir Castle in Tipperary sits on a rock island in the Suir and is one of the largest and best-preserved castles of its kind in the country. It is also unusually legible, because it was never comprehensively modernised: the keep, the two courtyards and the curtain walls are readable as a defensive system rather than as a picturesque outline. A cannonball is still lodged in one of the walls from the 1599 siege.

The Rock of Cashel

Not a castle at all, strictly, but the seat of the kings of Munster and later an ecclesiastical complex, and no list of the most picturesque sites in Ireland can leave it out. The round tower, Cormac's Chapel and the roofless cathedral sit on a limestone outcrop above the Tipperary plain, and Cormac's Chapel contains the most important Romanesque frescoes in the country.

Kylemore and the Victorian castle

Kylemore Abbey in Connemara is what happens when a nineteenth-century industrial fortune builds a castle for pleasure instead of defence. It dates from the 1860s, it was never fortified, and its lakeside setting is the single most photographed view in the west of Ireland. Calling it a castle is a courtesy, but it is the most popular castle-shaped building in the country by visitor numbers.

Telling a real castle from a Victorian one

The test is the windows and the walls. A genuine medieval castle has small openings low down and larger ones only at the top, walls that batter outward at the base, and a plan driven by defence, never by view. A Victorian castle has large windows at ground level, thin walls, symmetrical towers, and rooms arranged to look out over a landscape. The same distinction applies to British house styles on the other side of the Irish Sea, where the Gothic Revival produced dozens of comfortable houses in castle dress.

Both traditions can be seen in a single week in Ireland, often within a few miles of each other, and the contrast is the most instructive thing about them. For the English equivalent of the unfortified great house of the same period, see Gainsborough Old Hall, which was built for display and hospitality at exactly the moment Irish builders were still building for defence.

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