The Castle, Main Street, Moate, Co. Westmeath

A tower house of the mid-sixteenth century forms the core, its walls thickened at the base with a batter, that outward-sloping profile common to defensive towers, built to deflect blows and resist undermining. Onto this, over the following two centuries, later owners grafted a three-storey wing and then a bowed two-storey extension, so that the building reads less as a single castle than as a layered record of three distinct ambitions for the same site. Paired sash windows survive on the elevations, a detail once common in Irish towns and now scarce enough to be worth noting on sight. Higher up, cut stone surrounds frame pointed-arched openings on the original tower, stonework that may have been salvaged from a medieval church rather than carved for the castle itself, and among the carved fabric is a sheela-na-gig, a carved female figure found on some medieval Irish buildings, generally understood as an apotropaic device meant to ward off harm.

The tower was built around 1550 by the O'Melaghlin family, who held sway in this part of the midlands before the building passed out of their hands. In 1659 Captain John Clibborn acquired the castle and set about repairs, and it was likely Clibborn who added the western wing not long after. The Clibborn family's stamp on the place deepened in the following century: James Clibborn carried out extensive works to the complex around 1730 to 1740, and by 1837 the topographer Samuel Lewis recorded it as the home of a Cuthbert Clibborn. The bowed eastern wing is thought to belong to the later part of that century, added perhaps in the 1760s, rounding off a building that had by then absorbed the tastes of several generations. A round-headed doorcase on the western wing, with its block-and-start surround and a fanlight of radiating spokes above a panelled timber door, belongs to this Georgian phase of remodelling, softening the defensive origins of the place with the vocabulary of domestic elegance.

The castle stands back from the road on raised ground, still set within grounds that retain a working sense of a country estate in miniature, with entrance gates to the east and a scatter of outbuildings around it, several now ruinous, some of them built from the fabric of still older structures. It remains in use as a private dwelling, so the building is best appreciated from its setting and approach rather than through direct access, but the roofline and window arrangement alone give a fair reading of its layered construction from the street.