Castle Forbes, Newtown Forbes, Co. Longford

It is not one. The crenellations were added around 1820, decades after the tower itself was built, and they belong to a building that spent most of its working life feeding people rather than defending them.

The structure dates to roughly 1650, raised at the same time as the original seventeenth century Castle Forbes, and it may have started life as a flanker, a small subsidiary tower positioned to guard an angle of the main building. At some point its purpose changed and it became a dovecote, or pigeon house, one of the fairly common features of Irish country demesnes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where pigeons were kept for a steady supply of eggs and meat. By the early nineteenth century that practice had largely fallen out of favour, and buildings like this one, freestanding single-bay towers with rubble walls and traces of early render, became rare enough that their survival is notable in itself. Around 1850 the tower was given a further lease of life, converted into a folly or eye-catcher, the term used for structures built or altered purely for picturesque effect within a designed landscape. The pointed arch window on the north elevation, with its dressed limestone voussoirs, likely belongs to this romantic phase, while the round-headed door opening on the south side, framed in cut limestone, may be older. Together the tower forms one piece of a much larger group of structures associated with Castle Forbes, a demesne assembled and reworked across two centuries of shifting taste, from defensive necessity to agricultural utility to ornamental whimsy.

The tower sits to the west of Newtownforbes, within mature parkland that still frames it the way an eighteenth or nineteenth century landowner would have intended, as a distant incident in the view rather than a building meant to be approached directly. Its battlements read as pure theatre up close, thin and decorative rather than functional, a reminder that by the time they were added the age of genuine tower defence in this landscape was long over.