County: Kildare Site name: GRANGE CASTLE, Grange
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 2:7 Licence number: 98E0228
Author: Dave Pollock
Site type: Castle - tower house and Bawn
Period/Dating: Late Medieval (AD 1100-AD 1599)
ITM: E 662054m, N 736509m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.375123, -7.067430
A few small trenches were opened to the south of the tower-house at Grange Castle, Carrick, Co. Kildare, to assess the presence and/or survival of early garden remains and to look for signs of the bawn.
The original tower-house (15th-century?) was set against one side of a banked and ditched bawn enclosure, partly a defence and partly a drain, which probably meshed into a pattern of small drained fields. (Two slices of ditch were uncovered but were not emptied.) The ditch at the foot of the tower-house was infilled in the early 17th century, when an elegant new top was set on the building and lengths of the rustic enclosure bank were replaced in mortared stone. A cluster of stone buildings and walled enclosures (standing today) was built around the tower in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries.
33 Woodlawn, Cashel, Co. Tipperary