Name: Jessica Cooke Address: Annaghdown, Co Galway Dwelling: Castle Here Since: this summer
My dad owned the castle for years and years, and when my husband and I drove out and had a look at it again in 1997, we fell in love with it so we set to work restoring it. My father was a structural engineer and was involved in the restoration of Dublin Castle in the late 1980s.
It's great fun renovating battlements, but it's much more stressful putting in kitchens and bathrooms. Doing battlements and winding staircases and stone masonry is very exciting and unusual, but there are no straight lines in this building, so getting the electrics and plumbing done was a real challenge.
It was basically just a picturesque ruin, although the structure of it was in good shape. There was no subsidence at all. But 17 of the winding stairs were missing, so it was very dangerous climbing to the top, and the battlements were gone. We reckon from the evidence we uncovered that it was probably abandoned during the Williamite wars in the late 17th century, and it had been uninhabited since then.
In some ways it's a very expensive three-bedroom house. The top room is big, with a big oak-beamed pointed roof, and we're putting in a minstrels' gallery, not particularly because we want one, but because half way up the wall is the door out to the wall walk and battlements. The wall walk is spectacular. The views of the lake are marvellous.
We were living in London until January. My husband, Sean Faughnan, is a movie producer. We came back because our daughter reached primary school age. She goes to the local primary school.
It's the most beautful place. What's great about it is that it is a kind of an enclave of artists, archeologists, writers and musicians. It has a sense of itself, creatively. We have quickly become part of Galway's art scene, too. I just had a play in the Project '06 Arts Festival in Galway. We've done more socialising with our neighbours here than we did in the whole 10 years living in London. There you don't talk to your neighbours.
Once you start restoring a castle, lots of people interested in historical building techniques turn up. But our foreman is local to Annaghdown, and we've been conscious about hiring locally. All the local people climbed that castle when they were children. They feel a goodwill and a kind of ownership towards it. The castle is part of the heritage around here. u
In conversation with Davin O'Dwyer