archaeological & built heritage assessment - The Heritage Council

access alignment is poor. The supporting structures underneath are in a bad state of repair and
assessment of this erosion has led to the conclusion that it cannot be retained as a functioning structure.
About 3km upstream of Carrick-on-Shannon the river is joined from the west by the Boyle Water. Here,
Area 2 extends into Drumharlow Lake at the west and onwards to Oakport Lough and Cootehall. There
does not appear to have been any attempt made to improve the navigation of the Boyle river until the
1840s, although boats carrying a small amount of cargo managed to reach Cootehall over the shallows
(Delaney 1987). An obstruction occurred at Tumna which was formerly a fording place and where even
today the passage is narrow. On the west shore there is the small ruined church and graveyard of St
Eidin’s (LE007-087---). Once through the Tumna shallows the navigation opens out into the broad waters
of Drumharlow Lake.
There are a number of country houses located in this area (such as Kilmore house, Oakport House and
Woodbrook House), a trend that also continues into the scenic area of Lough Key in Area 3. On the
south shore at the upper end of Drumharlow Lake is Woodbrook House, which was immortalised in
David Thomson’s classic, Woodbrook, in which he describes and evokes Anglo-Irish life from the ten years
he spent here in the 1930s as tutor to Major Kirkwood’s daughter, Pheobe. The book interweaves
nineteenth and early twentieth century political and social Irish history together with the authors
developing love for his pupil. In an epilogue he relates returning to Woodbrook in 1968, to find that the
Kirkwoods had sold off part of the estate to the local golf club, the wings of the house had been
demolished, and a local family, the Maxwells, who had formerly worked on the estate, had bought what
remained and lived in a few rooms at the back of the house. Woodbrook House was sold in 1970 to John
Malone.
In terms of archaeology, Area 2 is covered by RMP map sheets Roscommon: 2, 4 and 7 and Leitrim: 27
(see Appendix 1). In total there are seventy-eight recorded archaeological sites located within Area 2,
dating from the Neolithic period up to post-medieval times, including an unclassified megalithic tomb /
enclosures (9) / castles (3) / ringforts (37) / sweat houses (5) / earthworks (6) / a bridge site / canal
features (3) / a possible road / a moated site / crannógs (3) / churches (3) / cashels (4) / ecclesiastical
remains (2) / an altar / and a graveyard. The settlement evidence dates largely from the medieval period,
and also is of a defensive nature in the form of castles, ringforts and a moated site suggesting that Area 2
(particularly those lands located around Hartley, Port and Cleaheen) was utilised as both a politically and
economically viable region for local inhabitants of the time who exercised a deliberate control of the
resources the waterways corridor provided. Furthermore, they are indicative that certain shallow places
along the watercourse were important fording places in the past. This is evident up to the late medieval
period with the formation of Cootehall as village along the Boyle Water by the Coote family who had
been granted extensive lands in this area in the seventeenth century. In the 1840s the Shannon
Commissioners replaced the old eight-arch bridge at Cootehall with the present three-arch structure. It
was originally planned to site the new bridge further downstream, with an opening span in the centre arch
and to realign the road but, a much heavier expenditure than anticipated further downstream forced them
to severely curtail their north Shannon plans and thus the bridge was erected on the same site as the old
one (Delaney 1987).
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