Ardgillan Castle

The land near Balbriggan had belonged to Robert Usher, a wine merchant from Tallaght, before the Reverend Robert Taylor, son of Sir Thomas Taylor, 1st Baronet, built the house in 1738. The ground was quite wooded when he bought it, and he took on former soldiers from Bangor, County Down, paying a penny and a meal a day with a bed every night; they were also given a tot of Bushmills whiskey, brought in at 2s 2d a gallon. The building is a country house with castellated embellishments rather than a fortress: two storeys over a basement that runs out under the south lawns, with the living accommodation on the ground and first floors, servants' quarters and estate offices in the east and west wings, and the kitchen and stores below.

The house passed in the 19th century to Thomas Edward Taylor, son of the Reverend Edward Taylor (1768–1852) and grandson of Thomas Taylour, 1st Earl of Bective. In the 1850s George Papworth, who had already worked on nearby Kenure House, was engaged for renovations including farm offices, and Frederick Darley designed new stable blocks about the same time. The Taylors held Ardgillan until 1962, when the estate was sold to Henrich Potts of Westphalia.

Fingal County Council bought the estate in 1982 and renovated the house with the help of Fás, and President Mary Robinson opened it to the public in 1992. The 200-acre demesne is a public park of woodland and open grass, with a walled herb garden, a rose garden, a Victorian glasshouse and an ice house; guided tours take in the ground-floor rooms and kitchens, while the former bedrooms hold classes, exhibitions and a permanent display of the Down Survey colour maps. In the summer of 2005 the estate was host to a number of open-air concerts; the pop acts to have played there include Moby, R.E.M., Meat Loaf and Status Quo.

The Dublin to Belfast railway line passes the demesne, crossed by a bridge known locally as the Lady's Stairs, which was damaged by a truck strike in 2005 and reopened after repair in 2007. Local folklore has a woman haunting it: in one telling she waited on the bridge for a husband who had gone swimming and had drowned, and waited there until she died herself. The more accepted version names Lord Langford of Summerhill House in County Meath, who brought his recently wed wife to Ardgillan while he went hunting in Scotland; against the advice of the household she went swimming in November and was drowned, and Langford himself died a short while later. The ghost reported on the bridge is Lady Langford in her wedding dress, coming up to search for her husband at the castle.