archaeological & built heritage assessment - The Heritage Council

Jamestown
Jamestown was originally a small market town (formerly a parliamentary borough) and is noted as being of
very little importance prior to the settlement of Leitrim in the reign of James I. It was recognised as an
important strategic site for a fortified town and in 1621 the monarch granted it a royal charter and the
lands, which were incorporated under the designation of the sovereign, burgesses, and free commons of
the borough and town of Jamestown, and chartered them to build a new town near the Shannon.
In 1623, Sir Charles Coote, who had been granted the town together with several extensive landed
estates in the county, surrounded the town with walls and erected a castle on the banks of the Shannon,
which, in 1645 was besieged and taken by the Earl of Carlingford. Little remains of the castle however
there are some ruins of a church and graveyard just beyond the north gate. This is possibly the remains of
a Franciscan friary, variously described as 'ancient' (Lewis 1837) and 'c. 1630' (Butler 1901), which may
have been intended by Sir Coote for the town's use, perhaps as a daughter church of the pre-existing
parish (Thomas 1992). Degraded remnants of the wall survive and are shown on the current OS maps on
all four sides, the most extant being a stretch of 100m from the northwest corner to beyond the north
gate. The north gate is a simple but broad gateway causing the road to narrow slightly, with a curved
shallow arch and simple battlemented top, similar to the North Gate at Carrickfergus or watergates of
medieval towns such as Youghal (ibid.).
The town contained approximately forty-eight houses c. 1837. Also at this time, Lewis (1837) noted that
there was a large flour-mill, a school-house, slight vestiges of an ancient abbey on the banks of the
Shannon, and also of the castle; and there were formerly in the town a prison and barracks, both of which
had been destroyed. The towers or bastions originally consisted of 6-4 sided 'square' open-backed
flankers at four corners and 'triangular' variants centrally on long the east and west sides. There is no
extant evidence of a fosse and it is possible that a rampart was located inside the walls. The bridge and the
walled town are curiously separate, the bridge being 150m beyond the site of the south gate and, even if
the original bridge had been further north on a line with the Watergate, the town would probably still
have been set back from it (Thomas 1992). There is a quay south of the bridge and a weir north of the
town at which was the flour mill.
The Jamestown Canal was the first constructed back in the 1770s to by-pass the great loop of the river
Shannon and its shallows. The early engineers encountered hard rock; there were originally two bends on
this canal, it was considerably narrower than now and the lock was sited some distance up the canal
(ibid.). The Shannon Commissioners straightened out and widened the canal and built a new large lock,
however it is still possible to find traces of the early canal where it curved.
In prehistoric times the loop of the Shannon offered a good strategic site protected on three sides by the
fast flowing river. An earthwork rampart, known as the ‘Dún’ or ‘Doon’, it was constructed to defend the
landward approach. This was a great bank 5m high and 30m wide at the base which was extended from
the high ground by Jamestown bridge, crossing to meet the river at the a bend downstream of Drumsna.
Parts of the Dún can still be traced in this area. The Roman Catholic church in Jamestown is listed as a
protected structure in the county development plan.
Drumsna
Drumsna is a post town, located in the parish of Annaduff, on the river Shannon c. 2km west of
Jamestown, Co. Leitrim. Lewis noted c. 1837 that it contained 427 inhabitants, approximately seventy
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