Ardee Castle, Castle Street, Ardee, Co. Louth

This is no ruin preserved behind railings; it is a working building whose masonry tells two stories at once, one defensive and medieval, the other administrative and nineteenth century, fused into a single elevation without much attempt to disguise the join.

The tower house at the core of the building dates to around 1600, built as a fortified town house at a time when Ardee sat on a contested frontier of the Pale, the fortified boundary of English-controlled territory around Dublin. Corner towers project from the north-west and south-west, and a corbelled murder hole, a defensive opening set into the wall above a doorway through which stones or worse could be dropped on unwelcome visitors, survives on the north elevation, a reminder of the building's original purpose. Around 1850 the structure was substantially reworked into a court house, with the corner towers largely rebuilt and a two-storey infill range inserted between them; a bridewell, or lock-up, was added to the west at the same period. The result is a patchwork of masonry styles, from roughly-squared quoins and splayed instep walls on the older towers to the rubble stone string course and blank recess of the Victorian infill, with square and trefoil-headed arrow loops surviving alongside splayed brick and rubble voussoir arches from the later remodelling. A fragment of a moulded ashlar limestone paired window at ground floor on the north-west tower hints at still earlier detailing absorbed into the later fabric.

Approached from the street, the building reads first as civic architecture, its pointed arch door openings with ashlar limestone surrounds and painted timber double doors suggesting municipal business rather than siege warfare, until the eye travels upward to the crenellations and narrow arrow loops above. Terraces of housing flank it on both sides, so the tower rises directly out of the ordinary streetscape rather than standing apart from it, which perhaps explains why a building of this scale and complexity can be walked past without a second glance by those unfamiliar with what lies behind its later Georgian and Victorian dressing.