An Irish Castle to Call Your Own

The imposing wooden door creaks open and my children burst into the shadowy entryway, gleefully giggling as they race up the spiraling stone staircase. Holter, 5, counts out each one of the 50 steps as we wind our way up through a 550-year-old tower to the cozy stonewalled living room. A few moments later we’re peeking out over a corner of the fortified roof, gazing at miles of lush green farmland. Towering over everything in sight, we feel like kings of our own castle. For one night, we are.

An authentic Irish castle that dates to the late 1400s, Cahercastle sat in ruins for centuries before its new owner painstakingly restored it. Castles like this one, also known as “tower houses,” pepper the landscape of Ireland. Designed as both fortifications and residences, most are just a single tower stretching up above the landscape, the interior floors and walls long since crumbled away. None would make the cover of a guidebook, but there is something about their humble appearance that feels so ancient, so Irish, so connected to the land where they stand.

They are nothing like the country’s better-known castle-hotels, those extravagant properties that host fairy-tale weddings in breathtaking ballrooms and pristine walled gardens. Certainly, those places have their appeal (if you can spare the $2,000 and more a night some can run). But when I hear “Irish castle” my first thought is of places like Dunmore Castle, a modest stone ruin that I spent childhood summers playing in while visiting my mother’s rural Galway hometown.

My brothers and I would pretend we were medieval warriors deterring invaders while scaling up the decaying stone walls and searching for the secret tunnel a cousin told us led across the road to Fairy Hill.

Planning a trip back to Ireland with my own young children this summer, I could not wait to watch them spend hours playing in and around Dunmore Castle. My wife, Holly, suggested the kids (who spent many more hours of pandemic lockdowns watching “Frozen” than we’d care to admit) would also adore sleeping in a castle. We looked at some castle-hotels, but had fearful images of them sprinting down portrait-lined hallways imitating Princess Anna and Elsa, knocking over some priceless 15th-century vase. Then I discovered this entirely different breed of Irish castle accommodation, a small but growing number of places like Cahercastle, where enterprising people have taken on the daunting task of renovating ruined tower houses and renting them out, both on Airbnb and their own websites. We stayed in two of them. Here are those and two others that can be yours — for a night, at least.