County: Down Site name: GREENCASTLE
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: —
Author: C.J. Lynn, Dept. of the Environment
Site type: Castle - Anglo-Norman masonry castle
Period/Dating: Late Medieval (AD 1100-AD 1599)
ITM: E 724624m, N 811909m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.041277, -6.097209
A small excavation was necessitated by conservation work and was sited along the W wall of the keep and in an area at its SW angle between it and a barn which incorporates some 13th-century work.
The foundation of a masonry wall of uncertain use but of approximately the same date as the keep, was found running parallel to the W face of the keep and 4m from it. It was of one build with the 13th-century foundations and lower courses of the barn, and at the join was a plain doorway, blocked in the medieval period. This walling might have been part of a lean-to building against the keep, similar to one known to have existed in the 16th century, or a freestanding wall cutting off an inner ward. It might again have been part of a free-standing building between the keep and the W curtain wall.
To the S, between the barn and the keep, the outline in mortared rubble foundations of an original forebuilding was exposed. Its entrance faces west and the base of a flight of stone steps, presumably with a return, may have led to the original first-floor entrance.
Finds included sherds of 13th-century jugs, one almost complete (with rouletted applied strips) from the occupation layer W of the keep. Glazed English-style medieval sherds also came from within the forebuilding and from the make-up under the W wall of the keep. Some scraps of souterrain ware were found in deep crevices in the surface of the natural rock (filled with dark loam, elsewhere removed by the castle builders).
