Tower houses in Britain and Ireland

Tower houses (Irish: caisleán) appeared on the Islands of Ireland and Great Britain starting from the High Middle Ages.

[6] After 1500, many lords built fortified houses, although the introduction of cannons slowly rendered such defenses increasingly obsolete.

They were built by both the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish, with some constructed by English and Scottish immigrants during successive conquests of Ireland between the 1570s and 1690s.

County Clare is known to have had approximately two hundred and thirty tower houses in the 17th century, some of which were later surveyed by the Irish antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the 1890s.

[6] The Irish tower house was used for both defensive and residential reasons, with many lordly dynasties building them on their demesne lands in order to assert status and provide a residence for the senior lineage of the family.