Castle Forbes, Newtown Forbes, Co. Longford

Chimneystacks in cut limestone, crenellations chamfered into neat repeating teeth, machicolations with stepped corbels once meant for dropping stones on attackers now serve no purpose beyond ornament, and a cross pommée, a cross whose arms end in small balls, sits at the top of the tower as if to bless the whole enterprise. Much of the stonework is now ivy-clad, softening a silhouette that was built to look severe.

The Forbes family, originally from Scotland, took hold of this part of County Longford around 1620, when Arthur Forbes was granted extensive lands and built a residence on an L-shaped plan, possibly folding an existing castle into his new one. It did not have an easy seventeenth century: the house was badly damaged during a siege in the 1641 rebellion, though it recovered well enough that a visitor named Dowdall could describe it in 1682 as a fair and spacious house with lovely gardens of pleasure. Fabric from the 1600s and probably the 1700s still survives somewhere inside the current walls, buried under later work. The real turning point was a fire in 1825, which destroyed much of the old house; the 6th Earl of Granard's family squeezed into the surviving wings while the Cork architect John Hargrave remodelled what was left in the late 1820s. The building seen today is largely the work of the 7th Earl, George Forbes, and his wife Jane Colclough, who around 1860 commissioned J. J. McCarthy, an architect better known for his Roman Catholic church commissions, to rebuild the house in Gothic Revival style. That background shows: the paired lancet windows and the cusped lancets with quatrefoil tracery on the tower would look equally at home on a chapel, and indeed the house contains one, tucked into the top storey of its breakfront. A second fire in 1923 brought in F. W. Foster of London, working under the direction of Beatrice Mills, Countess of Granard, for a further round of remodelling. The design echoes a namesake house of the same name in Aberdeenshire, built in 1815 by another branch of the Forbes family, sharing its combination of a central breakfront entrance and a massive round tower at one end, and it sits among a cluster of comparable Gothic castellated houses raised across the midlands in this period, including Knockdrin, Tullynally and Killua in neighbouring Westmeath.

The Forbes family's reach extended well beyond this one house. Sir Arthur Forbes, made 1st Earl of Granard in 1684, served as a lieutenant general in the British Army and twice held office as Lord Justice of Ireland in the 1670s; the family had already been granted the Manor of Mullingar in 1661 and would control the town for two centuries. Later generations kept up the pattern of public service: the 3rd Earl became an admiral in the Royal Navy, the 6th Earl was created Baron Granard in 1806, securing an automatic seat in the House of Lords, and the 8th Earl held junior ministerial office under Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith before sitting in the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1934. The house remains at the centre of the largest demesne in County Longford, its grounds running down to Lough Forbes and the River Shannon, with an entrance tower and stable block still standing nearby as working parts of the wider estate.