The origins and development of the Tower House in Ireland in the light of recent research

Abstract

Tower houses are a familiar feature of the Irish countryside, and this investigation considers not only the circumstances in which they came to be built, but also the development of our appreciation of their place in the country’s history and archaeology. The approaches which have been adopted by others to the study of tower houses are described and assessed, and a number of questions arising from this previous work are further explored. Issues of significance which are raised in the course of the thesis include the conventional understanding of the tower house as a lone tower; the restrictive notion that tower houses were built in Ireland only from the second quarter of the fifteenth century (a notion which is intimately related to a particular view of architectural inactivity in the fourteenth century); and the place of Ireland’s tower houses in the broader contexts of castle constniction in the country and further afield.