vault is high up, over the third story, and there were two stories over it; a fireplace and garderobe in each story; one end of the tower is parted off by a wall, forming a sort of separate turret, divided by floors into bedrooms. The original windows are single lights, trefoil-headed, with interlaced ornaments in the spandrels; square windows are introduced in the upper stories. A bartizan at each of the four corners is corbelled out on the usual tongue-shaped corbels; there are two chimneys, one on each side. The alure is perfect, but the parapet nearly all gone. The staircase is good, of well-cut stone, with the angles rounded for a newel; in most of the Irish stair-turrets the angles at the end of the steps are left sharp, instead of the round newel usual in England. The lower part of the walls batters considerably. The principal doorway has sloping sides and a pointed arch. The hard limestone is here well worked. None of the building is earlier than the fifteenth century.
Aughnanure Castle, co. Galway, on the borders of Connemara, is a fine castle of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The central keep is nearly perfect; the outworks are in ruins; the work is very good, and there is ornamental carving in parts of it; one end has been rebuilt or altered in the sixteenth century; the earlier part is the best work. The state-room is at the top upon the vault, as usual, with windows of two lights trefoil-headed, splayed to a wide round-headed arch within; they have long and narrow lights divided by a transom, the lower part built up, and openings left for culverins. One square window is inserted; there is a large fireplace in the upper room. The garderobes are arranged in a turret within the walls; that is, they are placed one over the other, with a pit at the bottom open to the moat. There is a vaulted prison or dungeon with one small window and a square hole in the vault over it for a trapdoor, and no other entrance to it. One end of the tower is parted off and divided into small bedrooms. There are three stories under the upper vault: the entrance is into an inner porch of the usual Irish character. Two bartizans project from the first floor at the angles next the entrance, and there are portions of others from the battlements above, and the corbels remain in the centre of each face of the tower. Parts of the walls and turrets to both the outer and inner baileys exist, with a round tower in which are two domed vaults of the beehive construction, but evidently part of the work of the time of Henry VIII. A fine banqueting hall was built in the outer bailey at that period, one end wall of which only remains with the windows in it; they are tall and square-headed, with transoms and ogee heads to the lights, with dripstones over; the spandrels and the under sides of the dripstones enriched with carvings of late character
