Enniscorthy Castle, Castle Hill, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford

It is a small piece of architectural theatre on a building that, for all its imposing presence in Enniscorthy's streetscape, is really a late tower house at reduced scale, built in conscious imitation of the much larger Ferns Castle of the 1220s but dressed with the distinctive touches of a different century.

That century's imprint belongs to Sir Henry Wallop, who died in 1599 and who is credited with erecting the castle in 1588, giving it a rectangular plan with drum towers engaged at each corner, their slender loops (narrow openings once used for defence) still visible today. The building's later life reads as a compressed history of Irish political upheaval. It was defended with "great guns" against Cromwellian forces, and served as a prison during the 1798 insurgent occupation of Enniscorthy. The Royal Irish Constabulary billeted there during the Fenian Rising of 1867, and Irish Volunteers garrisoned it during the 1916 Rising, an episode still legible in the bullet marks concentrated around the parapets. By the late nineteenth century the castle stood vacant, and it was leased in 1898 before undergoing a thorough restoration between 1901 and 1903 under Patrick James Roche of Woodville, New Ross, whose work brought the structure back "from ruin" to something close to its present composition. That renovation, along with later works in 2006 to 2011, accounts for much of what survives: the granite doorcase with its hood moulding, the timber panelled door, and, inside, a hall with rusticated limestone panels, a cut-granite spiral staircase with a wrought iron balustrade in the south-east tower, and a second stair in the north-west tower with turned timber balusters rising to finial-topped newels.

The domestic quality of the upper floors is worth pausing over, since it sits at odds with the building's martial history. The first-floor drawing room retains a reclaimed white marble Classical-style chimneypiece, while the reception room next to it has a pair in red marble, both rooms finished with carved timber shutter surrounds and moulded plasterwork cornices below picture railings, refinements that speak to the castle's use as a residence in more settled periods. The building continued in occupation into the twentieth century, recorded as occupied in 1911 before being vacated in 1951 and sold in 1953. Set on its own outcrop with Vinegar Hill visible beyond the river, the castle's battered rubble walls are still part rendered on the north face and part covered in ivy elsewhere, a texture that makes the near-total reconstruction of a century ago easy to overlook at first glance.