Category Archives: Castle

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.


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A Victim of Temperance



After Monday’s examination of a fake castle in County Tipperary, here is a real one, albeit now in very poor condition, elsewhere in the same county. On the banks of the river Cromogue, Borrisoleigh Castle is a rectangular four-storey tower house, with the remains of a gable on the south-east wall and evidence of lower buildings once on the north-western side. It was constructed by a branch of the de Burgo (Burke) family, who were prominent in the area, although often under attack from their neighbours the O’Dwyers. A stone once embedded in a wall of the castle had a Latin inscription which translated as ‘Richard Bourke—Alice Hurley, Friend and foe make this marble rise. Come friend to our arms; the enemy begone.’ It has since been moved elsewhere. As for the castle, according to John O’Donovan who was employed by the Ordnance Survey in 1840, a brewery operated by the Biddulph family had been attached to the castle but by the time O’Donovan arrived, this had closed (he attributed the business’s failure to the temperance movement then being driven by the Capuchin friar Fr Theobald Mathew).



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A Little Known Site


‘Among Mr. Windele’s MSS.* in the Royal Irish Academy is to be found a comparison between Mallow Castle and that of Dromaneen, which latter was erected by the O’Callaghans, and occupies a strikingly bold position on a rock over the Blackwater, about three miles west of Mallow. He considers them as practically contemporaneous, each belonging to the Tudor era, and he is of opinion that Dromaneen may be taken as a specimen of the last phase of castellation in the descent from the lofty moated keep to the simple Manor House. The forms of doorways, fire-places, etc., would refer the date of the building at once to the close of Elizabeth’s reign. Both castles, he considers, fair specimens of the transition style which pervaded the strong houses of a semi-military class of the period. Mallow, somewhat earlier than the other, preserves much of the general form of the structure of the era of the Roses, while Dromaneen approaches more nearly to the modern domestic building. The precautions adopted for defence in the earlier castles are nearly all rejected in this, and what few military features it possesses seem to have been designed as much for ornament as protection. In both castles the broad Tudor windows descend in greater proximity to the ground, the dark loop disappears and the strongarched floors and stone stairs are absent; the walls are not of massive thickness, while domestic comfort and accommodation seem mainly studied. Mallow but little diverges from the old outline of the stately keeps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while Dromaneen is but the next step to the modern mansion, and all defences in the former are greatly abandoned, but still in a less degree than in the latter, as has been already noted.’
Extract from ‘The Manor and Castle of Mallow in the Days of the Tudors’, by Henry F. Berry, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, Volume II, March 1893.
(For more on Mallow Castle, see Picturesque Remains – The Irish Aesthete)





As noted above, Dromaneen Castle, County Cork dates from the early 17th century, c.1610, when constructed by Cahir O’Callaghan, who had submitted to the English crown and then been regranted the property. It stands immediately east of an earlier square tower house to which it is linked by a bawn wall. The castle’s location is particularly striking: to the south, it is approached across a wide flat plain, but the north side stands at the top of a limestone  above the river Blackwater. In 1637 Donough O Callaghan succeeded his father at Dromaneen and in the following decade he played a prominent part in the Confederate Wars, being a member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Confederation of Kilkenny. In consequence, and following the English parliament’s Act of Settlement of August 1652, he and his family were transplanted to County Clare and Dromaneen, together with 1,000 acres of land, were granted to Sir Richard Kyrle. Following his appointment as Governor of the Province of Carolina in America, Kyrle sold his Irish property to Richard Newman, who had already bought some 5,000 acres in this part of the country. Dromaneen Castle appears to have suffered during both the Confederate and Williamite Wars, being occupied by an English cavalry troop during the latter period. However, the Newmans are supposed to have lived there until c.1738 when they built a new residence nearby called Newberry. Thereafter the castle was abandoned and left to fall into the customary dereliction. 





Dromaneen Castle is an L-shaped building, composed of a three-storey gable-ended block to the north and what may have been a later, and lower, kitchen range to the south. Like so many other semi-fortified mansions built around Ireland during this period, the upper floors have large window openings and inside a particularly fine chimneypiece with mouldings can be seen on the first floor. As mentioned, the castle sits within a bawn wall, with principal access to the courtyard being through a handsome classical gateway, with an elliptical arch and a three-tier cornice carried on brackets: this is comparable to a doorcase seen at the near-contemporary Kanturk Castle elsewhere in the county (see An Abandoned Project – The Irish Aesthete). A fascinating site, although a National Monument Dromaneen Castle is located on private land, and this helps to explain why it is less well-known than other similar buildings of the same period.  


*John Windele (1801-1865) was a Cork-based antiquarian.

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The Real Thing


After last Monday’s discussion of the incomplete fantasy that is Brittas Castle, here are some remains of the real thing. Moylough Castle in County Galway dates from the first half of the 13th century and is associated with the Norman de Cotterell and de Cogeshale families who would have arrived in this part of the country around that time. Three sides of the building survive, of three storeys and constructed of local limestone rubble, almost 40 feet long and 21 feet wide, rising to 46 feet with walls over six feet thick. It is thought that the Normans occupied the site until the late 13th or early 14th centuries, after which it passed into the possession of the dominant O’Kelly family. However, like many such properties, it was probably abandoned in the 17th century and left to fall into its present ruinous state, today beloved only by the cattle sharing the same site. 


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An Unfortunate Accident

In January 1835, The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that Major Henry Langley of Brittas Castle, County Tipperary, ‘late Captain in the 2nd Life Guards’ had died the previous year on October 12th at the age of 48. The cause of death was not given, although, as will be explained, this was somewhat unusual. Major Langley was the descendant of Lieutenant Henry Langley, a Lancashire-born soldier who came to Ireland with the English Commonwealth army in 1649, and became a member of Colonel Hierom Sankey’s regiment of horse. According to the County Tipperary historian James White, writing at the start of the last century, while participating in the Siege of Clonmel in April 1650, ‘Captain Langley, who was one of the first to volunteer for service with the storming party, had his left hand cut off by a blow of a scythe as he was attempting to mount the breach.’ Nothing daunted, the injured man had his severed stump fitted with an iron hook and was thereafter known as ‘Langley of the Iron Hand.’ Five years later, he was rewarded for his services with grants of land in Counties Waterford and Tipperary, and these would remain in his family for several generations, with additions made through advantageous marriages. One of these was the union in 1754 of a later Henry Langley and Margaret Grace, heiress to the Brittas Castle estate, which had passed from the Butlers to her forebears in the  1660s. This was the property which Major Langley had inherited after his uncle Henry Grace Langley had died in 1821 without any surviving children of his own. 






An undated engraving, produced during the lifetime of Henry Grace Langley, shows the original Brittas Castle to have incorporated two squat square battlemented towers and one round tower connected by two-storey buildings, the whole fronted by a gable-ended, five-bay, three-storey house. Seemingly, this was badly damaged by a fire in 1820, after which the whole site was cleared and, following Major Langley inheriting the estate, ambitious plans drawn up for an entirely new castle to be built on the site. The architect chosen for this job was William Vitruvius Morrison and, according to his brother John, writing six years after William Vitruvius’s death in 1838, ‘The design of this edifice was by the desire of the proprietor, both in form and proportions, that of the ancient English baronial castle of the earlier period.’  The Norman Warwick Castle is often cited as a formative influence on the proposed building, where work initially progressed well but then came to a halt in October 1834 when Major Langley, who was inspecting progress, was struck by falling masonry and killed. After this disaster, the family appears to have gone into rapid decline because by October 1851 Brittas was in the hands of the Court of Chancery and two years later it was offered for sale in the Encumbered Estates Court. The purchaser, who paid £13,000 for the entire estate in December 1853, was Colonel William Knox, member of a Mayo family. His descendants lived there until the second half of the last century, after which it passed into the care of the present owner’s family. 





Material assembled in the 1830s for the never-completed Ordnance Survey Name Books observed that Brittas Castle was ‘a modern unfurnished building on a most magnificent scale but in all probability it will never be finished.’ Such indeed proved to be the case, with a long, single-storey dwelling instead being constructed to the rear of what had been done on the site. What stands – which was only intended to be the gatehouse to the main castle behind – is unlike anything else seen in this country, a towering structure comprising two octagonal battlemented towers some 60 feet high which flank an entrance which, if finished, would have been reached across a drawbridge, since a substantial moat was dug around the whole plot. As has been noted in the Irish Architectural Archive’s compendium of the Morrisons’ oeuvre (published 1989), no other castle by this architect ‘is, even in part, so austerely antiquarian.’ Although incomplete, what can be seen today displays extremely high standards of workmanship and finish. Behind the gateway are the remains of what would have been an enclosed courtyard, in turn leading to the main building, its walls left as a series of giant steps. The two towers at the front, with walls eight feet thick, climb three storeys, on each of which narrow passageways, lit by arrow slit openings, give way to a series of lofty, stone vaulted chambers. One can only speculate what the rest of the building would have looked like, had Major Langley not been struck by that piece of falling masonry. That unfortunate accident left his ambitious plans unrealised, but at least what survives is being well managed and allows us to imagine what, under other circumstances, might have stood here, a castle like no other in Ireland. 


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Of More than Ordinary Interest


‘Clonmines: Ths group of ruins is of more than ordinary interest, as it contains a church which was described by the late G. V. Du Noyer as, in his opinion, quite unique in Ireland, if not in Britain the fortified or Castle Church of Clonmines [see last section of text below]. This singular building stands on a rise of ground adjoining the monastery but detached from it, and when viewed from the westward quite resembles a square castle, the north-east and south-west angles of which are prolonged into small but lofty crenellated turrets. Du Noyer thinks that it is exceedingly probable that this building was erected by Nicholas the clerk at the close of the fourteenth century…’





‘…Clonmines was a parliamentary borough, and elected members of Parliament until the Union. A castle was built here by one of the family of Roger de Sutton, who accompanied Fitz Stephen to Ireland. This castle was in modern times converted into a dwelling-house. Archdall, in his “Mon. Hib.,” states that “Clonmines is a borough town, in the barony of Shelburne, six miles south-east of Dunbrody. The family of Cavanagh founded a monastery here for Eremites following the rule of St. Augustine. In A.D. 1385 it was enlarged and beautified by Nicholas the clerk, son of Nicholas; and the friars of the order of St. Dominick afterwards obtained possession of it. Nicholas Woding was the last prior…’





‘…Fraser, in his Survey (Robert Fraser, Statistical Survey of the County of Wexford, 1807), tells us that the Danes had a mint at Clonmines, and we learn from the State Papers that Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queens Mary and Elizabeth, all worked the silver and lead mines here. On the 12th of January, 1552, Joachim Gunderfilgen explains to the Privy Council that he is building a workshop at Ross, and was unable to send particulars about the mines. Later on Mr. Robert, Record Surveyor of Mines for the Privy Council of England, sends an account of the silver and lead got at Clonmines and molten at Ross. In the time of Queen Elizabeth, Walter Pepparde had charge of these mines for the Queen; his son Anthony seems to have been the founder of Peppard’s Castle, Co. Wexford.’
Extracts from Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Volume VI, Fifth Series, 1896.





‘I allude to a fortified church, or rather castle-church, forming one of the groups of ecclesiastical ruins at Clonmines on the shore of Bannow Bay, in the county of Wexford. This singular building stands on a rise of ground adjoining the monastery, but detached from it, and when viewed from the westward quite resembles a square castle, the north-east and south-west angles of which are prolonged into small but lofty crenellated turrets…The doorway nearly facing the spectator conducts to the church, and the arched recess adjoining it may have been intended for a tomb or seat, and probably the former. Externally this church measures thirty-seven feet by twenty-six feet, the walls being five feet thick, thus imparting to it an unusual degree of strength and solidity; the parapet walls are about two feet eight thick , and are all embattled.
The east wall is pierced, at the height of about seven feet from the ground, by a small window of two pointed lights. It is not till we enter this building that its true character and object become apparent, and we at once perceive that we are in a lofty arched room, half church and half residence. The eastern end of this room forms a square of sixteen feet six inches, and is groined with massive chamfered ribs, springing from each corner, and crossed by others, springing from the sides. This groining defines the limits of the church; the remaining western portion being simply arched, and is somewhat lower than the eastern, thus forming a flat typanum overhead, against which was laid the wooden partition which screened off the living room. In the sill of the window on the south side, is a small piscina; and in the north and south walls, at their junction with the east wall, there are small square unornamented aumbries; to the right of the door in the west wall there is a small stoop.’ 
Extracts from ‘Notes on some Peculiarities in Ancient and Mediaeval Ecclesiastical Architecture’, by George Victor Du Noyer, Esq in Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society, Volume V, New Series, 1864-66


Please note: The remains at Clonmines, County Wexford stand on private land and are not open to the public.
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An Antiquarian’s Delight


The O’Dwyer family claimed descent from Milesius of Spain who, according to legend, conquered Ireland for the Gaels (hence the term ‘Milesians’ to describe the Irish race). By the late Middle Ages, the O’Dwyers had settled in the Barony of Kilnamanagh, Co. Tipperary, where their primary base was Dundrum, some eight miles to the west of Cashel. In this area, they constructed a number of castles, not least one at Dundrum, later replaced by a house constructed in the 18th century for the Maude family. Not far away, in the 16th century the O’Dwyers built another large castle at Killenure, which remained an important base for them until the Confederate Wars and their aftermath. According to the Civil Survey of 1654, the site had until then been occupied by ‘Charles O’Dwyer of Cullynuer Irish Papist.’ As for the property, it was described as ‘one demolished castle irreparable and one thatched house.’ Like many other such families, in the course of the Cromwellian settlement, the O’Dwyers were dispossessed of their lands, which in this case subsequently passed into the ownership of a branch of the Coppingers, who have featured here before (see Holding Court « The Irish Aesthete). They must have been responsible for adding a small residence to the east of the castle, using this as a shooting lodge. However, in 1746, the Coppingers sold Killenure to William George Cooper. 






The first of Killenure’s new owners to arrive in Ireland was Austin Cooper, originally from Surrey where he inherited property, but having sold it for some £1.500 around 1661, he moved to this country and settled in County Wicklow where he became responsible for the gardens around the house at Blessington built by Michael Boyle, future Archbishop of Armagh. There Cooper was responsible for creating one of the finest baroque gardens in Ireland, its greenhouse was one of the first places in the country where fruit was grown out of season. He became renowned for his feats of strength, such as taking two men, one in each hand, slapping them together and throwing them on a dunghill. Seemingly, if he held onto a cart, the horse pulling it could not move. It was his great-grandson, William, who moved to Killenure, having been appointed Diocesan Registrar of Cashel by Archbishop Arthur Price. Cooper and his wife Jane Wayland would have 14 children, their eldest son Samuel acting as land agent for his neighbours, the Maudes of Dundrum, whose estate management was much admired by Arthur Young when he visited in 1776. One of Samuel Cooper’s younger brothers was Austin Cooper who despite a life working in the Irish Treasury Office in Dublin is today remembered as an ardent antiquarian who measured, described and drew historic monuments, predominantly castles and churches, throughout the country. All this material was donated by the family to the National Library of Ireland in 1993: one of his pictures shows Killenure Castle, as it then looked. 






As can be seen here, Killenure Castle is very much a building in two parts, with a large house built to one side of the old O’Dwyer property. As it exists now, the two-storey house is L-shaped, and dates from two periods, the original five-bay pedimented block c.1770 and what is now the entrance front of four bays added c.1800. Adjoining this to the west stand the substantial remains of the original building, which is a curious blend of an old-fashioned defensive castle and an Elizabethan manor house, with a gable-fronted facade, mullioned windows and tall chimney stacks. Another distinctive feature is that it has a circular defensive tower at each of the four corners. One of these towers has later, larger window openings with brick surrounds, indicating this section was in use relatively recently but otherwise the castle seems little altered since first constructed, although nothing of substance remains inside. The Coopers remained at Killenure until 1963 when the estate was sold and the family moved to England. Happily,after a period when it appears the future of the property was in doubt, almost 20 years ago, it was bought by a family and has remained well cared for ever since.


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A Gothick Set-Piece



The castellated entrance into the former estate at Tynan Abbey, County Armagh. In his definitive guide to the gate lodges of Ulster (1994) J.A.K. Dean describes this the building as a romantic Gothick set-piece and attributes its design to John Nash who in the early 19th century was working at neighbouring Caledon and who also drew up plans, unexecuted, for Tynan. As Dean notes, the gate is in the form of a double ‘portcullis’ in a Tudor archway recessed below machiolations, the whole framed within a tall screen wall, with the gate keeper’s accommodation found within a polygonal tower at one end. Tynan Abbey itself was gutted by fire in 1981 after its then-owner Sir Norman Stronge and his son James were shot dead by the IRA: the remains of the building were eventually demolished in 1998.


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Three Quarters Left



After last Monday’s concern over the fate of Ballyteige Castle, County Wexford, here is an example of what can happen to a neglected historic monument. This is Barnaderg Castle, County Galway, a five-storey tower house believed to have been built by Malachy O’Kelly in the 16th century. Standing on a low mound and in an area prone to flooding, even in summer, the building was probably once entirely surrounded by water and reached via a drawbridge. Today, only three sides of the tower house survive, the south being entirely gone and those on both the west and east (where a mullioned window can be seen on the fourth floor) are vulnerable.



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Norman Wisdom


Nine years ago, Wexford County Council opened the first phase of ‘The Norman Way’, a 65-kilometer self-guided heritage trail along the south-east coast, which leads to a variety of mediaeval buildings in diverse stages of repair. According to the website promoting this route, while the Normans invaded England in 1066, ‘a century later they came to Ireland,’ thereby suggesting that their arrival in this country was an altogether peaceable affair. Furthermore, apparently, ‘as generations of Normans made their home here, their Norman way of doing things enhanced everyday life in Ireland.’ It’s open to question whether the native Irish were delighted to welcome the arrival of Norman wisdom. As Tony Canavan of History Ireland has observed, ‘from a historian’s point of view, on the trail’s website and information panels, ‘the presentation of the Normans (setting aside questions of definition) may raise an eyebrow’ since they are portrayed not as invaders but as though they were modern-day immigrants. It is easy to understand the appeal of creating such a route – the official site expresses hope that this initiative will stimulate commercial and community benefits in the areas through which it runs – but this ought not to be at the expense of historical accuracy. 





Although of Norman origin and hard to miss as it rises above the flat Wexford countryside, Ballyteige Castle is not one of the sites included in The Norman Way. For several hundred years, this was one of the seats of the Anglo-Norman Whitty family, with references to its members being found in Irish documents from 1247 onwards; in 1418 Robert Whitty of Ballyteige became Bishop of Ferns, an office he held for the next 40 years. The original castle is said to have been burned by Art Mac Murrough Kavanagh in 1408, so what can be seen today – a four-storey tower house – was constructed after that date. What makes the site particularly fascinating, and important, is that so much remains, including much of the bawn wall and two large circular towers at the north-east and north-west. Attached to the tower house and running along the east side is a later house, now abandoned and boarded up, and behind this is what would have been a substantial courtyard enclosed by the western wall. It is known that the Whittys remained in occupation of Ballyteige until the mid-1650s when, like so many other Roman Catholics, Richard Whitty had the property taken from him. Ballyteige was then granted to the Colcloughs of nearby Tintern Abbey (see The Little Sister « The Irish Aesthete) and it was later sold to an Edward Meadows. It appears to have been occupied until relatively recently, but is now abandoned and falling into dereliction. 





Some two miles north-east of Ballyteige Castle can be found a cemetery surrounding what remains of a mediaeval church called Grange, thereby suggesting it was once part of a monastic estate. On the church’s interior north wall is a large and well-preserved monument to Walter Whitty of Ballyteige. In April 1594 he had been kidnapped by Spanish sailors whose vessel was then passing along the Wexford coast, and carried back to their country after they declined payment for his release, declaring that ‘they desired more the credit in Spain of having taken a great gentleman prisoner, than any ever so great ransom.’ (cited in Journal of the Waterford & South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society, Vol IV, 1898). Somehow, Walter Whitty managed to find his way back home and spend the rest of his days at Ballyteige where he died in 1630, but the marble monument inside the church dates from 1647. The Whitty coat of arms features a lion rampant, but locals, perhaps unfamiliar with these animals, preferred to believe it was a cat. This, in turn, gave rise to a legend that a feline murderer was responsible for Whitty’s demise. There seem to be two versions of the story. In one, Walter Whitty, having failed to shoot any rabbits while hunting, took out his wrath on a cat he saw sitting on a sandbank. When he returned home to Ballyteige Castle, a cat on the premises took its revenge by lunging at his throat and killing him. In the other version, Whitty seduced the daughter of a local witch and then, having taken her out to see in a boat, drowned the girl. Hearing of this, the witch transformed herself into a cat, lunged at Whitty’s throat and killed him. Strangely, neither account features in the Norman Way literature. Neither does Ballyteige Castle, which could benefit from official attention as a building that holds evidence of human habitation across many centuries, from the Normans to the present day. 

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