archaeological & built heritage assessment - The Heritage Council

pre-colonial Ireland. There is one castle of which there are extant remains located within the study area
at Corry, Co. Leitrim (originally MacConvasa’s moated site), while there are a further four castle ‘sites’
where no upstanding remains exist.
Medieval Ireland was a heavily encastellated land. Leask (1951) estimated that 3,000 castles (including
earth-and-timber castles and late semi-fortified houses) were built in Ireland between the late 1100s and
the 1600s. Almost all the extant Anglo-Norman stone buildings of a non-ecclesiastical nature in Ireland
appear to have been equipped for defending or were parts of larger complexes, which were so equipped
(O’Keeffe 2000). As such, in a military sense they can be termed castles. Very few of the wealthiest Irish
castles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rival the wealthiest contemporary English or Continental
castles, in either scale or sophistication. A number of the earliest stone castles of the Anglo-Normans in
Ireland appear to have ‘great towers’ or donjons, essentially ‘chamber towers’ in which the private
chambers of the lord and his household were arranged vertically through three or four storeys; these
donjons are also referred to as keeps (ibid.). ‘Great halls’ were located elsewhere in castle complexes, and
both their size (usually one or two storeys high) and their physical separation from the chamber towers
suggests that these halls were reserved for the use of public banquets and the administration of public
affairs.
Tower houses were built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as lordly residences by both Gaelic and
Old English (Norman) families. Barry (1996) estimates that 7,000 tower houses were built in Ireland.
Though not castles in a strict military sense, designed primarily to repulse attack, they belong to the same
tradition and retain many of he features of ‘true’ castles, such as battlements, machicolations and narrow
slit windows; a group of later tower houses also include gun loops as an integral part of the design. The
majority are tall rectangular towers, three to five storeys in height, each storey occupied by one main
room; one and sometimes two, of these rooms are covered by a wicker-centred vault. Features common
to all tower houses include wall-presses, base-batters on external walls, and floor-support features such
as joist-holes and corbels. Due to the thickness of the tower walls, many of the window and doorway
embrasures are covered by what are essentially mini vaults, rather than arches, built in the same fashion as
the main vaults with wicker centring, occasionally plank centring; otherwise, the embrasures are roofed by
lintels. The outer enclosure or bawn, often with corner towers on the angles, is occasionally preserved
and was usually built abutting the tower house rather than completely enclosing it. There are two ‘castles’
located within the waterways corridor that were probably originally tower houses at Castle Island and
Clegna, Co. Roscommon. Both have now been much altered with eighteenth and nineteenth structural
additions.
Defensible houses – residences capable of being defended but not intended to be fortress-like in
appearance – appeared in Ireland towards the end of the 1500s (O’Keeffe 2000). They retained a vestige
of defence and machicolations were still used. They can vary in design from a central rectangular block
and projecting corner towers of square plan; a central block with splayed corner turrets like bastions on a
star-shaped fort; a central block, only one bay in width so that the exterior views are dominated by the
four corner towers; and there are early seventeenth century houses with three projecting towers, with
cross-shaped or T-shaped plans. There are the remains of two fortified houses located within the study
area at Aughry on the shores of Lough Bofin, Co. Leitrim dating to c. 1640 and owned by the Nesbett
family and another at Mohill dating to c. 1621 belonging to the Crofton family.
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