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

Ardkeen Tower House is situated on a small peninsula on the eastern coast of Strangford Lough, commanding spectacular views across the surrounding countryside and water. The site represents the earthworks and remains of a tower house with adjoining medieval settlement, later superseded by an eighteenth-century gentleman's residence and small estate.

The surviving physical evidence is limited. A mound approximately 6.5 metres across remains, surrounded by a ditch that is primarily visible on the eastern side and interrupted by a small causeway. Little else survives of the tower house itself beyond scattered rubble and a curious hollow, possibly a former well or dungeon. The ruined church of Ardkeen with its graveyard stands approximately 200 metres to the south-east of the mound.

The site may have been occupied in early Christian times and possibly represents an ancient rath. The 'Castle of Archen' is recorded as belonging to John de Courcy in his charter to the Black Abbey (St. Andrews) dated around 1180. During the later medieval period, a branch of the Savage family established a manorial centre here, with the church and a substantial group of houses occupying the immediate vicinity of the tower house. The settlement was attacked unsuccessfully by Shane O'Neill in 1561 as part of his attempt to gain supreme rule over Ulster, and was seized from Raymond Savage by Lord Deputy Essex in 1574. Beyond these events, little recorded history of the building survives.

By around 1744, Walter Harris documented that a dwelling house stood within the rampart alongside the castle, though this had been demolished in the early 1700s by Hugh Savage, who constructed a new residence called the 'Dorn' on a lower, more sheltered part of the peninsula to the east. This new house, apparently completed shortly after Hugh Savage's death in 1723, was equipped with its own deer park and tree-lined drive. Following the construction of the 'Dorn', the old castle was abandoned and partially demolished. According to the historian G.F. Savage-Armstrong, however, the substantial remains of Ardkeen Castle were largely obliterated around 1820 by Reverend Alexander Bullick, the parish incumbent.

Savage-Armstrong himself attempted excavation of the site in the summer of 1898, uncovering part of a spiral staircase and evidence of two towers, to the east and west. He also arranged loose stones on the western side, shored up fragments of the east tower, and 'built around' a doorway to the south. The 'Dorn' house was abandoned by Francis Savage around 1800, with little now remaining of it. In 1814, Lady Harriet Savage, Francis's wife, built a school for local children on the Dorn estate. Although the school appears to have closed in the 1850s, the building still stands on the Rowreagh Road and is currently used as a piggery.

The site represents earthworks of indeterminate age alongside the documented remains of the later medieval tower house and settlement.