Carrolls Castle

Carrolls Castle in Ballyknockan, County Offaly, preserves a large rectangular bawn with two surviving circular corner towers and gun loops cut through walls nearly a metre thick. The lost tower house at the northeastern corner has collapsed into rubble, but the southern entrance arch, wide stone avenue and flanking towers still outline a fortified household where the eastern half served defence and the western half sustained domestic life. The design resembles Kilcolgan castle, suggesting a shared Offaly tradition of angular tower defence during turbulent seventeenth-century times.