Talbot Castle, Abbey Lane, Trim, Co. Meath

It is a small oddity that hints at the building's original purpose as a fortified manor house, where raising the entrance above ground level offered a measure of defence. Roughly dressed stone walls, square-headed and pointed-arched windows, some crowned with hood mouldings to throw off rainwater, and red brick chimneystacks rising from a pitched slate roof complete a structure that has clearly been added to and altered over centuries rather than built to a single plan.

The site itself predates the current fabric, having originally held Saint Mary's Abbey before the present two-storey-over-basement house, comprising two ranges and a tower, went up in 1415. Habitation continued here in some form from that century onward, with successive owners leaving their own mark on the building's tastes and layout; the attic storey on the garden front, for instance, was only added at the start of the twentieth century. The building's most notable chapter, though, belongs to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it served as the Diocesan School of Trim, known locally as the Latin School. Two pupils in particular give the place its claim to fame: Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, and the mathematician and astronomer Sir William Rowan Hamilton both received their early education within its walls, a striking pairing of a future military commander and a future scientific mind sharing the same schoolroom generations apart from most visitors' expectations of a rural Meath building.

A carved plaque set into the stone walls and the rubble stone boundary walls with their piers and cast-iron double gates are worth pausing over on the approach, small details that survive alongside the grander architectural gestures of arched windows and defensive entrance steps.