Ashtown Castle, Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, Chesterfield Avenue, Dublin 8, Co. Dublin
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Fortified Houses
For much of the twentieth century, this squat tower house sat concealed inside a much larger residence, its medieval walls absorbed into a grander eighteenth-century shell so completely that few passers-by would have guessed a fortified building lay beneath.
Only when the later extension was demolished in the 1980s did the original structure re-emerge, a three-storey tower with a stair turret at one corner, its saddle-back roof and parapets intact behind centuries of alteration. Restoration work in the early 1990s uncovered fragments of a roof truss embedded in the wall, evidence used to date the core of the building to the early seventeenth century, probably around 1605. Odd traces in the stonework hint at a further wing once standing to the north, though no dig has confirmed it, so that part of the story remains open.
The tower's early ownership is similarly patchy. Its builder is not recorded, but by 1641 the estate belonged to John Connell, a distant ancestor of Daniel O'Connell; a 1654 survey oddly lists him as a Protestant, a detail that sits awkwardly with the family's later association with Catholic emancipation. Stone quarried at Pelletstown, on land Connell owned, went into the original boundary wall of what would become the Phoenix Park. In 1663 the Duke of Ormonde bought the castle and its lands for the crown, and it passed into use as the official residence of the Park's second Keeper, Sir William Flower, who in turn handed it down to a subordinate. Later in the eighteenth century it was enlarged to serve as residence for the Under Secretary, and after Irish independence it housed the Papal Nuncio. When that later wing came down in the 1980s, the site was even weighed up as a possible official residence for the Taoiseach, a scheme that would have required restoring the tower house to something like its original form.
What survives now is rare simply for being so close to a capital city; fortified tower houses of this kind are far more commonly found scattered through the countryside than standing within a few kilometres of a city centre. The building sits within the mature gardens of the former Ashtown Demesne, laid out by the landscape gardener Ninian Niven around 1840, with the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre and a walled garden nearby to the west. The footprint of the former Ashtown Lodge, long since gone, is traced out in low box hedging on the ground beside it, a quiet outline of a building that no longer stands next to one that, against the odds, still does.
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