Is it time to buy your dream Irish castle?

First-time visitors to Humewood Castle in Kiltegan, County Wicklow, can't help it. They simply say, "Wow."

It's that big, that stunning -- that, well, fairy tale. It's vast and turreted, and the view of the mountains looks like a Hollywood backdrop.

Humewood, an Irish estate on 427 acres, roughly a 90-minute drive from Dublin, includes 15 bedrooms, a ballroom, a banqueting hall and a billiards room, among other amenities. And an American, John Malone, now owns it.

Last November, the 72- year-old billionaire chairman of the cable and telecom giant Liberty Global got it for a song.

He paid around 8 million euros, or roughly $10 million, for the 32,668-square-foot granite Victorian Gothic bastion, built in the 1860s. That's about a third of what it sold for in 2006, near the height of the boom in the Irish economy. That year, it was bought for 25 million euros by an Irish real estate developer, Lalco Holdings, which had planned to develop it as one of Ireland's leading luxury resorts with golf course included. That scheme was shattered after the real estate bubble burst in 2008.

Malone is among an increasing number of Americans with deep pockets returning to their Irish roots to buy castles and manor houses at distressed prices -- with cash.

Many of the properties are changing hands for about a third of 2007 levels, thanks to the country's exodus of property developers, many of which failed when the market collapsed.

The developers, along with Ireland-based business executives, were once the main buyers of Irish stately homes, according to Harriet Grant, head of country house and estate sales at the broker Savills Ireland in Dublin. "It's been really interesting because we didn't really have American buyers in our market for many years," she said.

But the attraction of the Emerald Isle's much lower prices and a slowly strengthening economy has changed that.

Overseas buyers accounted for nine of the top 10 sales of Irish country mansions in 2012 -- several of them Americans, according to the Dublin-based estate agency, Sherry FitzGerald Group. In 2013, this trend continued "with Americans leading the way, although there is emerging interest from Asia and in particular China and Japan," said David Ashmore, director at Sherry FitzGerald.

For example, Charles Noell, founder of the Baltimore-based private equity firm JMI Equity, bought Ardbraccan, an 18th-century mansion set on 120 acres of land with formal gardens outside the town of Navan in County Meath. Noell paid nearly 4.9 million euros, or $6.3 million, according to Savills, the firm that handled the sale. It was originally listed in 2008 at triple that.

Of course, many wealthy American buyers have managed to remain anonymous in a number of cash purchases during the last 12 months, said Ronan McMahon, a global real estate expert who reports on real estate trends for International Living, a magazine and Web site specializing in living abroad.

Is it time to buy your Irish castle? There's not a lot of competition. High earners in Ireland, who might have been in the market a decade ago, no longer are because of the dearth of bank financing. So the potential market is a very small number of cash buyers, Grant said.

But there is not a huge number of high-end estates in good condition on the market in Ireland, she said. That is not all that surprising, given that the Republic of Ireland is roughly the size of West Virginia.

"You might in one year have 10 available," she added. "But after four or five years of absolute stagnancy in the market, prices have come down to a level deemed to be good value; the economy is steadying, and suddenly you have international buyers taking note of Ireland."

But even those properties priced at fire-sale prices aren't really cheap.

"I've seen castles and historic homes sell at auction for very small amounts, but they're still a high-end purchase," McMahon said. "That's because if you're buying a very low sticker-price castle, it's probably run down.

"Those charming old stone walls can be quite damp and drafty, not only in winter, but during a rainy Irish summer, too."

And if the home is categorized as protected or of "national importance," you are required to maintain it.