1996:051 - KILCOLMAN CASTLE, Kilcolman Middle, Cork

NMI Burial Excavation Records

County: Cork Site name: KILCOLMAN CASTLE, Kilcolman Middle

Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 94E0108

Author: Eric Klingelhofer, History Department, Mercer University

Site type: Castle - tower house and Bawn

Period/Dating: Post Medieval (AD 1600-AD 1750)

ITM: E 558059m, N 611353m

Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.252298, -8.614258

The four-year project of fieldwork at Kilcolman Castle, Co. Cork, was completed in 1996, with grants from the Earthwatch Foundation for field research, Mercer University, and the Royal Archaeological Institute. The team worked on site from 25 July to 15 August.

The goal for 1996 was to continue excavation between the tower house and the bawn (Trench B) and the south-east corner turret (Trench C) to determine their construction, function and relative dating. Favourable weather permitted the opening of a new area (Trench J) to examine interior structures within the castle.

The excavation of Trench B uncovered a complex stratigraphical sequence (compromised by Victorian trenching) comprising three major elements: the fifteenth-century bawn wall and its tower house, the garderobe (privy) shaft and cesspit added to the tower house, and the late sixteenth-century construction by Spenser. Many details of the castle's construction and early development await more comprehensive excavation, but it does seem that an east-west section of walling was (re-?)used as the south side of a cesspit for the added garderobe. The fill of the cesspit survived on the west side of Trench B, and it had been covered by a layer that may correspond to the destruction layer of Spenser's structures. The original line of the south bawn wall may have turned here, and wall lines running north-south here should also be part of the medieval castle plan, connecting the original southeast corner of the tower house to the south bawn wall, where its south-west corner may have held a small turret.

In the east side of Trench B, a gap in the plaster face of the Tudor 'parlour' corresponds well to the surviving elements of a cobble platform, identified as a rebuilt hearth. Evidence for a chimney rising at the junction of tower house, privy and parlour has been destroyed by Victorian trenching. Within the parlour itself, removal of a 0.1m-thick layer of destruction rubble exposed the spread of ash and burnt timbers in situ that had been discovered in previous testing. This deposit, which also contained a number of butchered animal bones and domestic artefacts, covered the plastered surfaces of the room's wall bases. An intact clay tobacco pipe of early seventeenth-century style proves that the fire that caused this layer was not part of the 1598 sack of the castle, when Edmund Spenser fled the site, but rather the c. 1615 fire that caused his son, Sylvanus, to leave the rebuilt structure for a new, 'English'style house elsewhere. Trench B also yielded evidence of the repairs made by Sylvanus, and indeed of the construction and destruction of Edmund Spenser's house. Excavation at this point was limited, in the effort to aid future excavations by causing as little intrusion as possible.

In Trench C the base of the walls onto which the southeast turret had been built was reached. A clear sequence was established, including that the bawn walls here were not built upon the sound limestone foundation of the hillside but in front of it, upon clays relating to the Kilcolman Bog. The only foundation was provided by the batter of the outer wall, its base spreading outward perhaps 0.5m. The space between the limestone hill (probably quarried here into a vertical face) and the bawn wall created room for an undercroft or cellar beneath a great hall built along the south side of the castle. At some point this cellar was partially filled with loads of heavy, mixed clays and soils, probably because of dampness owing to its location. The corner turret was then added, with a 0.8m x 1.2m rough stone-lined sump in the extreme south-east corner. The turret was set partially upon the new made-up cellar fill, and partially on a new wall line nearly 1 m to the east. On that side, a 0.78m-wide garderobe chute emptied, but with no accompanying cesspit. The corner turret may be best identified as a garderobe addition at the end of the great hall.

Trench C yielded additions to the artefacts from Kilcolman: large lumps of iron slag from a medieval smithy and much late seventeenth-century refuse associated with a cottage in Trenches B and J, built after the Spensers had left. However, a significant find came from levels that could be related to Spenser a well-worn bone (or walrus ivory?) tuning-peg from a lute.

Trench J examined the relationship between the structures identified as the great hall and the parlour. In a 5m by area, destruction rubble was removed to expose the wall line serving the east end of the cellar and the west end of the parlour, as well as the west end of the late seventeenth-century cottage. Trench J contained a corner of the cottage structure and the edge of its cobbled farmyard. This cobbling covered and protected the lower courses of the demolished parlour's walls and their attached plaster. The wall of this structure was again found to be bonded in clay, and beneath it ran the mortared masonry of the great hall/cellar.

The 1996 archaeological fieldwork corroborates and expands the limited historical record. Kilcolman Castle seems to have been constructed in the fifteenth century and underwent major renovations in the sixteenth, most noteworthy being the stair/garderobe tower in the tower house and the garderobe facility in the great hall. The Spenser family occupancy of the castle (c. 1587-1617) marked an extensive period of construction, with new masonry of clay bonding being erected often upon older, mortared walls or foundations, a pattern found throughout the site. The archaeological potential of Kilcolman has been lessened by masonry recovery, lime-kiln operations, and more recently by treasure-hunting. Nevertheless, the project has shown that extensive, well-stratified deposits remain to be explored on the site and that it should be possible to recover the complete structural plan of Spenser's castle and to determine its functions during his occupancy.

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