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A Closer Look at Ardee

The town of Ardee is notably for many things, not least its two fine castles, 'Hatch's Castle' and 'The Courthouse'. As its name might suggest, the latter is the more imposing of the two, not least because of the way it dramatically projects out into the wide main street of the town.

This castle nones the ubiquity and adaptability of the Tower House form in late medieval Ireland. For Tower Houses were built not only in the countryside but also in medieval towns. In urban settings, the Tower House usually sheds its surrounding bawn (walled courtyard), no doubt because of the pressures of space but probably also because of the presence of the communal 'town defences'. None the less, a recurrent feature of such tower houses is their strategic placing within the urban landscape. This suggests that many of them were sited not just to be imposing residences but also to contribute to communal defence.

'The Courthouse' is a splendid example of this duality in the role of the urban Tower House. Strategically placed at the junction of the main north-south street with the side street leadings towards Kells, it functioned not only as an imposing building but also as a key-point in the collective defence of the town.

Tower Houses were the standard defended residences of the rural gentry in Ireland for over 200 years from AD c.1400 to 1650. They are the most common type of stone castle in Ireland constituting well over 75 % of all castles built. While no accurate totals have yet been calculated, it is estimated that there must have been well over 2500 of these structures originally.
Towers of similar design also occur in parts of Scotland emphasizing that until the 17th century, Scotland and Ireland formed part of a single cultural province stretching form Kerry to the Orkneys. On a macro- level, the popularity of these towers can also be read as an index of the breakdown of centralized power in Ireland and Scotland in late medieval times.

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