It seems to have taken a considerable period to reconcile the native Irish to the use of castles or tower houses as places of every-day abode. The free-roving Celt could ill brook the confinement of narrow vaults and stifling chambers. To him, as a chieftain actually declared, ‘a castle of bones was every way preferable to a castle of stones.’ By this was meant that the head of a clan, surrounded by his following of hardy kerns and gallowglasses, was safer and every way better off than an effeminate sojourner between the four walls of a tower. A time at length arrived when the native potentates, petty chieftains, and gentlemen of lesser degree, followed the example of their invaders, and erected stone dwellings, very similar to those of the strangers with which they had become familiarised. These almost invariably consist of a tall quadrangular tower, with or without outworks, but generally furnished with a bawn or enclosure into which at night, or during raiding times, the owner’s cattle were driven. The apartment on the ground-floor was almost invariably covered with a vault of stone, evidently a precaution against fire. In some instances all the flooring was supported on pointed or barrel arches of stone; but, generally, the upper storeys were provided with floors of timber. A staircase of stone usually led to the upper apartments; sometimes it ran straight through the thickness of the wall from floor to floor, access to the various apartments being provided by narrow doorways, with pointed, flat, or semicircular heads. These three forms are not unfrequently found in the one building. Sometimes the staircase is enclosed in a projecting tower, and rises spiral fashion, with doorways at one side like those already referred to. A second staircase leading to small apartments, which may have been used as bedrooms, is often to be noticed.