

Although looking like a Scottish Baronial castle, this is the former Royal Irish Constabulary Barracks in Cahersiveen, County Kerry, designed in 1865 by Enoch Trevor who five years earlier had joined the Irish Board of Works where he served as Assistant Architect until his early death in 1881. Built in the early 1870s to protect the telegraphic cable link between Europe and America which had been laid in 1866, the four-storey building overlooks the river Ferta. Its white-washed rubble stone walls have stepped gables and circular towers with machicolated conical roofs on the north-west and south-east corners. The barracks were burnt by retreating anti-Treaty forces during the Civil War in August 1922 and left a shell until the early 1990s when restored under the auspices of a local community initiative. It now houses a local museum.



Lovely to see a fine building restored and having a new purpose.