Tag Archives: Ruins

Remarkably Few Architectural Decorations



‘Ballybogan: Called for some time the priory of de Laudi Dei; was situated in the barony of Moyfinrath, on the river Boyne; and three miles south of Clonard.
A priory was founded here for canons of the order of St Augustin, in the 12th century, by John Comin, under the invocation of the Holy Trinity.
Whilst Hugh Tachmon, Bishop of Meath, enjoyed the episcopal see, Walter the younger, the son of Alured, granted an annual rent of 40s to the prior of this house, out of the manor of Moyaghregh, alias Magagthreth in this county.
1399. By an inquisition taken in this year, it was found that John O’Mayller, a mere Irishman and of the Irish sept of the O’Mayllers, enemies to our Lord the King, was instituted to the priory of the Blessed Virgin in Ballybogan, contrary to the form of the statute of Kilkenny; but Richard Cuthbert did, on the same day, make due proof that the said priory was not under the invocation of the Virgin Mary, but dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and that he was the lawful prior thereof. Cuthbert was accordingly restored to the temporalities.’
From Monasticon Hibernicum by Mervyn Archdale (Dublin, 1786)




‘1446. The priory of Ballybogan was burnt in the beginning of this year. (Dud. Fir.)
1447. In the summer and autumn of this year there raged a great plague, of which the prior of Ballybogan, the prior of Connell, the baron of Galtrim …. and a great number of others in Meath, Leinster, and Munster, died. Some say that 700 priests died of this plague. (Four Masters)
According to Ware’s Annals, the crucifix of Ballybogan, “which”, he says “had been held in great veneration”, was publicly burnt in 1538. The last prior of Ballybogan was Rev. Thomas Bermingham, in whose time this monastery had to surrender its vast possessions, numbering five thousand two hundred acres of arable and pasture land, in various counties. In 1541 all the manors, lands, and liberties of this abbey, with the title and dignity of ” Baron of Carbrie”, were granted by Henry the Eighth to Sir William Bermingham, at a rent of £4 3s 4d.f By the forty-first of Elizabeth, the reversion was granted to Edward Fitzgerald and his heirs. In 1608, King James the First granted to Sir Edward Fitzgerald, Knight, amongst other properties: “The site, etc., of the late monastery of Ballybogan, with all the buildings, orchards, gardens, etc., thereto appertaining, and all lands, customs, and hereditaments in Ballybogan, with a fair there, and a watennill, parcel of the estate of the said monastery”.’
From The Ecclesiastical History of the Diocese of Meath by the Rev. A. Cogan (Dublin, 1862)




‘Close to the river side is Ballyboggan Priory, with a very large cruciform Ch. (of which the transepts have been destroyed), founded in the 12th cent, by Jordan Comin, for Augustine Canons. The priory was burned down in the 15th cent., and subsequently the lands and property fell into the hands of the Bermingham. The length of the Ch. is 193 ft., but there are remarkably few architectural decorations about it. The W. gable is lighted by a long slender single window of E. Eng. date. In the N. wall of the choir are 3 trefoil arched Sedilia.’
From A Handbook for Travellers in Ireland by John Cooke (London, 1906) 



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A Picturesque Ruin



Just about enough survives to give visitors an idea of the former scale of the Franciscan friary on the edge of Armagh city. This was founded by Archbishop O’Scannail in 1263 and according to the Annals of the Four Masters, it was under the patronage of MacDomhnáill Gallogláigh (‘of the Gallowglasses’). The church, running to almost 164 feet, was supposed to be the longest of any of this religious order in Ireland, with a tower added between nave and chancel in the 15th century. Little now remains, because after the friary was suppressed in 1642, it fell into ruin, with Hugh O’Neill staging an ambush within the walls in 1596. The lands on which it stood passed into the control of the Archdiocese in 1620, and almost a century and a half later, during the primacy of Richard Robinson, much of the stone was used to build the garden walls of his new demesne, with the remainder left to serve as a picturesque ruin.



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Wanting Repair




In the past, the Irish Aesthete has come across several examples of late-mediaeval cylindrical tower houses, which seem to have been constructed only in Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary. From the latter county, this one can be found in Ballysheedy (sometimes Ballysheeda). Thought to date from the late 15th century, it seems originally to have belonged to the O’Dwyers, who were the dominant family in this area, the barony of Kilnamanagh Lower. Of five storeys, the building was recorded in 1607 as being in the possession of John O’Dwyer of Dundrum, deputy chief of the Dwyer clan. In the Down Survey of the mid-1650s, it is described as ‘the small castle of Ballysida wanting repair.’ Such remains the case today.


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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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Castles in the Air


The origins of the Royal Irish Constabulary can be traced back to July 1814 when Robert Peel, then Chief Secretary for Ireland, established the Peace Preservation Force, a rudimentary policing body intended to counter growing rural unrest around the country. The colloquial names ‘Bobby’ and ‘Peeler’ used to describe members of the police force originated during this period and were derived from Peel’s name. Sir Richard Willcocks, a former Dublin Magistrate and Special Government Magistrate, is the PPF’s first appointed Chief Magistrate and was sent to the Barony of Middlethird with a base at Cashel, County Tipperary. This part of the country includes the village of Annacarty, which lies some ten miles north-west of Cashel. Within a few years, it was experiencing disturbances occasioned by Cornwallis Maude, 3rd Viscount Hawarden whose family had a history of evicting tenants and raising rents on their estate. In 1821, he provided the land on which  a police barracks was built in Annacarty. A year later, Peel’s legislation was superseded by the Irish Constabulary Act, which established a police force in each of Ireland’s four provinces, all having their own inspector-general appointed by the Lord Lieutenant. The Constabulary (Ireland) Act of 1836 then merged those provincial forces into a single centralized body (though it did not operate in the capital, which retained its own force, the Dublin Metropolitan Police). Following its involvement in the suppression of the Fenian Rising of 186, Queen Victoria granted the organisation the prefix ‘royal’, being thereafter known until its disbandment in 1922 as the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). 






During the War of Independence (1918-21), the RIC Barracks at Annacarty was attacked on several occasions and, as a result, the resident force was supplemented by members of the Black and Tans (‘Temporary Constables’ made up largely of British ex-soldiers who were brought to Ireland in an attempt to suppress revolution). During this period, the barracks sergeant was a man called Cornelius O’Sullivan, originally from Kerry: his being from outside the area was not unusual in the RIC, since there was a concern that locals might have an excessive allegiance to the immediate locality). It appears that O’Sullivan was in contact with the IRA unit in the area, encouraging it to take the barracks. However, he was then taken away from the site by members of the British military and never seen again, presumed killed: his body has never been found. Perhaps due to its defensive design, Annacarty was one of only two RIC barracks to hold out throughout the War of Independence. Once the Following the official declaration of a truce between the British and Irish on 11th July 1921, the building was handed over to the local IRA which then occupied the building. Unfortunately, the following year it was subsequently attacked by an Anti-Treaty force and a siege of several days then took place. After the barrack’s leader was wounded and his men had run out of ammunition and supplies, in early May 1922 they were forced to surrender. The Anti-Treaty group then set fire to the place, which has stood a ruin ever since. 






Standing on high ground above and a short distance from the village, the former RIC barracks in Annacarty is of interest for a number of reasons, not least that it was one of the very first such buildings to be constructed, believed to be 1821-2. The architect is unknown, but must have been someone with an interest in historic design, since the barracks takes the form of a miniature castle, with crenellations along the roof level, an hexagonal tower on the south-west corner (note the gun loop on one of its sides) and a bartizan on the north wall. There’s also an unusual cross pommy-shaped gun loop on the second floor of the west wall, further indicating a knowledge of mediaeval architecture. The large arched openings on both ground and first floor soften the otherwise aggressive appearance of the barracks, but overall its form is indicative of the need at the time it was commissioned for a police barracks capable of withstanding attack: most later RIC barracks were altogether more domestic in character and quite often stood within the local town, rather than apart from it. While the interior of the building has now gone, the sturdiness of its construction means the barracks continues to provide an observation point for activity in the immediate area. A fascinating survivor.


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Ecclesiastical Ambition




Yet another example of the Church of Ireland’s ambitious building strategy during the 19th century, this is St John’s in Kilturk, County Wexford. Later than most and not part of the Board of First Fruits programme, it was designed in 1859 by Joseph Welland, then Architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the first service being held here three years later. One reason for the relatively late date is that it replaced an earlier church of 1808-12, described by Samuel Lewis in 1837 as ‘a neat edifice whose tower fell down soon after its erection’ and this, in turn, stood on the site of a medieval parish church. The present structure continued to be used for services until the mid-1970s, and after its closure suffered from vandalism, leading to large-scale dismantlement and leaving what can be seen today.




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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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