Historic Building Details

HB Ref No:
HB24/02/046

Address :
Ardkeen Tower House Castle Hill Rowreagh Road Ardkeen Kircubbin Newtownards Co. Down BT22 1A?

Townland:
Ardkeen

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Survey 2:
Record Only

Date of Listing:

Date of De-listing:

Current Use:
Demolished

Former Use
Castle

Conservation Area:
No

Industrial Archaeology:
No

Vernacular:
No

Thatched:
No

Monument:
Yes

Derelict:
Demolished

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OS Map No:
187/12

IG Ref:
J5930 5710

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Owner Category

Central Govt

Exterior Description And Setting

Site of former tower house on a small peninsula on the E coast of Strangford Lough with a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside as well as the Lough. Little remains save the mound (c.6.5m across) and a ditch (mainly to the E side) broken by a small causeway, all of which may pre-date the tower house of which there is little evidence surviving apart some scattered rubble and a curious hollow [?a former well or a dungeon]. The ruined church of Ardkeen with its graveyard lies c.200m SE of the mound.

Architects

Not Known

Historical Information

It has been suggested that this site was used in early Christian times and may even have been the place of an ancient rath. The ‘Castle of Archen’ belonging to John de Courcy is referred to in his charter to the Black Abbey (St. Andrews) in c.1180. During the later medieval period a branch of the Savage family appear to established a manorial centre around the castle with the church and a not insubstantial group of houses in the immediate vicinity of the tower house itself. This settlement was unsuccessfully attacked by Shane O’Neill (as part of his attempt to become the supreme ruler of Ulster) in 1561 and was seized from Raymond Savage by Lord Deputy Essex in 1574, but apart from this there is very little else we know about the history of the building. Walter Harris, writing c.1744, mentions that there was a dwelling house as well as the castle enclosed within the rampart, but that this house had been demolished in the early 1700s by Hugh Savage, who had built himself a new home (called the ‘Dorn’) on a lower more sheltered part of the peninsula to the east of the castle. This new house, which appears to have been completed shortly after Hugh’s death in 1723, had its own deer park and tree lined drive. Presumably, after the building of this new abode the old castle was finally abandoned and may also have been at least partly demolished. According to G.F. Savage-Armstrong, the historian of the Savage family in Ireland, however, the substantial portion of the ruins of Ardkeen were obliterated c.1820 by Rev. Alexander Bullick, the then incumbent the parish. Savage-Armstrong himself attempted to excavate the site in the summer of 1898 and uncovered part of a spiral staircase and indications of two towers, to both east and west, however, he also arranged some of the loose stones on the west side, shored up the fragments of the east tower and ‘built around’ a doorway to the south. Whether his work was a help or a hindrance to the study of Ardkeen castle we may never know. The ‘Dorn’ house appears to have been abandoned by Francis Savage c.1800 and little trace now remains of it. In 1814, however, Francis’s wife, Lady Harriet Savage, built a school for local children on land belonging to the Dorn estate. Though the school appears to have closed in the 1850s, the building is still stands today on the side of the Rowreagh Road and is currently used as a piggery. References- Primary sources 1. Monasticon Anglicanum: a history of the abbies and other monasteries, hospitals and frieries...in England and Wales, William Dugdale London 1661). New edn. John Caley, Sir Henry Ellis and Bulkeley Bandinel, 6 vols (London 1846), vol. II, p. 101. [De Courcy’s charter to the Black Abbey.] Secondary sources 1 Walter Harris 'The Ancient and Present State of The County of Down' (1744), p. 48. 2 'Taylor’s and Skinners’s Maps of the roads of Ireland' (Dublin 1777) [The ‘Dorn’ house built by Hugh Savage is marked on map 11.] 3 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps, 1st Edition, 1834, Co. Down 25. 4 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), p.2. 5 PRONI VAL 1B/35 1st valuation, Ardkeen, c.1835. 6 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps, 1st revision, 1860, Co. Down 25. 7 PRONI 2nd valuation, Ardkeen, c.1863. 8 G.F. Savage-Armstrong 'A genealogical history of the Savage family in Ulster, being a revision and enlargement of certain chapters of “The Savages of the Ards”' (London 1906), pp.330-34. 9 'Archaeological Survey of County Down' (Belfast, 1966), pp. 197-98. 11 A.J. Hughes and R.J. Hannan 'Place-Names of Northern Ireland Vol. Two, County Down II- The Ards', pp. 9-12 12 Patrick Breen ‘The Castle Hill’ in 'Journal of the Upper Ards Historical Society No.7' (1983) pp. 11-14 . 13 EHS SMR Dow 25:5.

Criteria for Listing

Architectural Interest

Not listed

Historic Interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Earthworks of indeterminate age and the site of a tower house with adjoining settlement in the later middle ages, with the site eighteenth century gentleman’s residence and small estate close by.

General Comments

Date of Survey

25 September 1997