Benefitting from Attention

‘”Grey Lambert,” as he was called, had taken up his abode in a corner of the castle under whose shadow they stood the lonely castle of Coolhull – and no entreaty could induce him to leave. He was a singular, but a fine looking person; wore neither hat nor cap; never cut either his beard or hair, which were purely, perfectly white, and flowed over his shoulders, and down his breast, even below a leather girdle that encircled his coarse frieze wrapping coat; his feet were bare; his forehead high and bald; his dress clean, betokening singularity, but not poverty; and he had been a traveller in his youth-a sailor-a soldier -some said a pirate; but that, I firmly assert, never could have been the case, for Lambert was the gentlest of old men; children and animals (who seem to have an instinctive dread of bad people) all loved him; and on Sunday evenings the village urchins, and their little cur dogs, visited him in his castle, or sat at his feet on the green sward, while he recounted tales and adventures of other lands. ‘
Extract from Sketches of Irish Character by Mrs S C Hall (London, 1829)

Relatively little is known about what Mrs Hall described as ‘the lonely castle of Coolhull’ in County Wexford. It is believed to date from the 16th century when constructed by the Devereux family, whose Norman forebears, originally from Évreux in France, had come to Ireland with Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, otherwise known as Strongbow, and been granted lands by him in this part of the country where they remained prominent and built a number of castles before losing much of their property in the mid-17th century following the Cromwellian settlements. Unlike elsewhere, there does not appear to have been a castle on this site before the 16th century when the Devereuxes acquired the land on which it stands. The first Ordnance Survey of 1840 markted the castle as a roofed building, and a drawing made by William Frederick Wakeman for the OF service during this period shows it to have been thatched. However, it would appear that the castle then ceased to be a residence, a farmhouse being built close by and the older structure given over to agricultural purposes. Handed over to the Irish State in the 1970s, it has undergone considerable restoration in recent years.

Coolhull Castle is rather unusual in design, comprising a four-storey tower at the west end attached to a three-storey fortified long house. Tower houses sometimes had such a building added to them at a later date, but this is all of the same period, a uniformity being given to the structure by having the same stepped crenellations along the roofline. The whole building constructed of local granite, for defensive reasons it had only one entrance, found on the north wall of the tower. Once inside, a door to the left provides access to the house while a newel staircase immediately ahead rises anti-clockwise to the upper floors of both the tower and the fortified house. Inside the former, each level is thought to have held a garderobe and bedroom. Meanwhile, the house contained cellars and storage areas on the ground floor, with the main living space, the hall, was on the floor above, along with the most important bedroom, each of which had its own fireplace; surviving granite corbels indicate that the ceilings in these spaces were not as high as would have been the case in earlier periods, but the window openings were larger, permitting more light to enter. The windows on the uppermost floor are noticeably smaller and fewer, and there are no fireplaces, suggesting that this was where the family’s retainers lived. According to the late Sean Rothery, there are some 130 castles in County Wexford, but Coolhull is quite unlike most of them and it is therefore wonderful to see that its fabric has been given necessary attention.