My tower house is ready to play its part in celebrating our heritage

IF the neighbours weren’t used to it, they’d demand the destruction of my house. It is one of the ugliest buildings in the neighbourhood. In fact, it wins the prize for being ugly, leaky, and disfunctional.

Plus, it cannot be missed, this one-bedroom residence with windowframes spotted by all-pervasive salt. You know that description “stainless steel”? It doesn’t apply where I live. The atmosphere is so salty that brand new items made of iron, steel, and aluminium all rust like they had been submerged like the Titanic and around the same time. That means kitchenware always looks manky, while every blade becomes blunt and every needle, pin or staple spreads rust stains on everything it touches.

My short, stubby, squat house is unique, yet matched in general design to a string of others like it, all of them passive aggressive by virtue of placement and by virtue of scale. They were the product of state coercion and misplaced paranoia. The British were sure that Napoleon was coming after them by sea and — led by Admiral Jervis, who had been impressed by how a rounded tower in Cape Martella in Sicily withstood bombardment by his water-borne cannon — resolved to build almost eight copies of that tower around the coasts of Britian and Ireland. They figured walls 8ft thick and a canon circling on the conical roof would make each tower virtually impregnable, and each being in line of sight of the next would allow any two of them to catch incoming ships in crossfire.

Once the guys at the top had made the decision, the fiat went out and site-selection began. Nobody was given a choice. Landowners were descended upon around the year 1800 by the British admiralty and told “we’ll be taking that promontery you own on the coastline. Pay you later.” Records don’t reveal any great opposition from the landowners. Maybe they felt that to try to deny royal forces a bit of land no larger than an old acre would have been treasonous. Maybe they agreed that the protection of the coastline from maritime attack would be good for everybody, including them. Or maybe the ones owning chunks of Irish coast didn’t spend much time in this country and therefore didn’t care that much.

One way or the other, up the Martello towers went, built at tremendous speed over a five-year period, mostly using local materials, which gives rise to the regional variations between them. The ones on the southside of Dublin, for example, are built of cut Wicklow granite, whereas their counterparts on the northside are built of rubble. Even 200 years back, we northsiders were getting the rough end of the stick.

I appreciate that this description may affirm your determination never to visit any Martello, least of all mine, but I would beg you to make this week the exception, it being Heritage Week, when old buildings in private ownership are thrown open to the public. Some old buildings — but a good scatter right throughout the country. In some cases, access is free. In the case of ours — northside Martello Tower number 7 — a request is civilly made for a voluntary contribution of a fiver (children free) because insuring a tower in order to allow it to be visited by members of the public is astonishingly difficult (only one company in Ireland covers buildings of this age for public access) and extremely costly. But if you’re broke and baulk at the fiver, we’ll still welcome you and let the paying customers hate you.

A local authority expert once said to me, in a moment of indiscretion, that people who buy Martello towers are nuts. She was right. But the buyers were not always nuts. It’s something specific to Martellos that pushed them over the edge, just as it’s something specific to Martellos that creates (appropriately) a spider’s web of relationships arising from the tower.

Theproperty guy who sold it to us — not that he had to kill himself, if we’re being honest — went on to be a friend and when, alongside his wife, he set up Intro Matchmaking, a company matching couples up, he became a client.

Bryan Greene, one of the men on the team that originally tore down the accretions of nasty stuff that had been plastered onto the inside walls, got so hooked on the tower he kept visiting it, which exposed him to a force of nature unique to Portrane called Mary Linders. Mrs Linders knows every stone in the tower for more than 50 years. More to the point, she knows every flower and bulb in the elaborate gardens, and has passed on her knowledge to Bryan, who has spent the last fortnight sprucing every carnation in expectation of visitors during Heritage Week.

David Sheane, after whom the motor racing Formula Sheane is named, sends his engineer Nicholas out in advance to make sure the lift to the first floor stays in safe working order.

Heritage Week extends that web of friends as Bryan and I take people on a full cellar-to-roof tour and he then swops Latin plant names and slips with the gardening buffs among the visitors.

Every now and then, someone who is afraid of heights gets panicked at the idea of climbing to the roof. One man last year experienced his panic attack halfway up the spiral staircase and became immobile, which delayed things for a bit. He couldn’t have chosen a safer place for a panic attack, because it would be pretty damn difficult for a man of his rotundity to fall down a spiral staircase built for conscripted soldiers from the slums of Birmingham and Manchester, stunted, as they were, by malnutrition and chainsmoking. The only disadvantage was that the traffic got backed up a bit while we unstuck him.

Visit the Heritage Council’s website to find out more about Natioal Heritage Week, which consists of more than visiting old buildings.

It will tell you more about a couple of other Martellos open to the public in the next few days. They’ve called ours “Terry and Tom’s Tower” and if you click on the names it will tell you how to book in advance. You can, of course, turn up unbidden, but if you’re not on our schedule, you might have to wander around the gardens for a bit while another group is taken up to the roof, where they will fight against the wind while taking pictures of the stunning view.

In the past week, I’ve been starring in a seriously low-grade version of Downton Abbey, and in the servants’ quarters, at that, trying to get the place semi-presentable. I even blackened the stove.

Now comes seven days of telling visitors about our version of a building with the aesthetic appeal of an obese walrus that never did what it was supposed to do. Always hoping they love it as much as we do.

A local authority expert once said to me that people who buy Martello towers are nuts

A local authority expert once said to me that people who buy Martello towers are nuts