Clonyn Castle, Delvin, Co. Westmeath

Clonyn Castle, overlooking the village of Delvin in County Westmeath, was raised between 1867 and 1876 on a square plan with a round tower at each corner, a form borrowed directly from the medieval Anglo-Norman stronghold that once stood nearby. By the time it went up, the age of the great Irish country house was already fading, which makes this one of the last of its kind, a Victorian building dressed in the armour of the thirteenth century.

That earlier borrowing was no accident. The original Delvin Castle was built at the start of the 1200s by Hugh de Lacy for Gilbert de Nugent, part of the wave of Anglo-Norman fortification that followed the invasion of Ireland, and it shared the same square footprint with corner towers that the Nugents would later echo. Six centuries on, the family seems to have wanted their new house to wear the weight of that lineage openly, its heavy limestone walls, battlements and machicolations, gaps in the parapet once used for dropping objects on attackers, projecting a sense of ancient authority rather than genuine defensive need. The architect was John McCurdy, better known for Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel and the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire, while an oratory inside is said to be the work of George Ashlin, who also designed Delvin's Catholic church for the same patrons in 1873. Inside, a two-storey hall with a Romanesque-style arcaded gallery in marble and Caen stone gives some sense of the ambition involved. The castle itself replaced a seventeenth-century house, still standing to the rear, which carries a carved Nugent coat of arms dated 1680 and later Georgian Gothic additions; it may even preserve fabric shown on the Down Survey mapping of the 1650s. To the north, a scatter of outbuildings survives, including a circular structure reputedly built in the seventeenth century for training horses.

Clonyn Castle stands within grounds now given over to a golf course, and the building remains a visible landmark on approach to Delvin, its silhouette of turrets and crenellations set against the surrounding Westmeath countryside.