Known variously as the Record Tower, the Black Tower, and the Wardrobe Tower, it is the oldest surviving element of the castle complex, and its layered nomenclature hints at how thoroughly its function shifted across seven hundred years of continuous use.

Construction of the tower was underway around 1228, placing it among the earliest phases of the Anglo-Norman fortification of Dublin. A mural tower, in the architectural sense, is a tower built into or projecting from a defensive wall rather than standing independently, and this example was originally one of several that anchored the castle's curtain wall. It was restored and re-roofed around 1566, suggesting it had fallen into some disrepair by the mid-sixteenth century, and the battlements visible today were added as late as 1819, which goes some way towards explaining why the tower's upper section has a somewhat different character from its lower courses. The name Record Tower reflects one of its more prosaic later roles: it was used to store government documents, a function that kept the structure occupied and, arguably, preserved. By 2002, the tower survived in what archaeological records describe as modified form, its fabric altered but its essential mass intact.

The tower sits within the Dublin Castle complex in the south city, a site that is generally open to the public and well signposted from Dame Street. Visitors who enter the Upper Castle Yard tend to focus on the Georgian State Apartments and the Chapel Royal, but the Record Tower stands apart from those more immediately legible buildings. Its sheer scale becomes apparent on closer approach; three storeys of rubble masonry with a girth that speaks to defensive intent rather than administrative elegance. The accumulated later additions, particularly the nineteenth-century battlements, make it worth pausing to consider which parts of what you are looking at belong to the thirteenth century and which were applied much later, a question the building does not answer at a glance.