What is recorded here

Indicated is an ornamental tower built in the late 18th or early 19th century, yet it steals chambers and bones from a forgotten 16th-century house. The circular stair twists upward through a square chamber, forcing the mind to bend around its own shape. You can still touch the chamfered jambs and limestone sill embedded in the west wall, materials pulled from another building and made to serve a new fantasy.

On the E side of the road leading S from Killarney, 300m SE of Flesk Bridge. A square building (5m x 5m; H c. 8m; walls 0.6m thick) with an attached circular tower, containing a spiral stone stairs (int. diam. c. 1.35m), midway along its N side (see plans in Bary 1996, 32). It has a cruciform slate roof with each wall rising to a gable, and contains two floors with an attic; the building was partially restored in the mid-1990s. The ground floor window on the W wall incorporates a limestone sill from a mullioned window, and two chamfered jambs. These are of late 16th/early 17th-century date. Some of the quoin stones have similar tooling marks and are probably of the same date. However, the building itself appears to be a late-18th/early-19th century ornamental tower, but incorporating these earlier fragments whose origin is unknown. Compiled by: Elizabeth Byrne, Ursula Egan and Sheila Ronan, Archaeological Survey Unit, University College, Cork. Date of upload: 31 January 2011

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