County: Tipperary Site name: NENAGH CASTLE, Nenagh
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 96E0228
Author: Brian Hodkinson
Site type: Castle - Anglo-Norman masonry castle
Period/Dating: Late Medieval (AD 1100-AD 1599)
ITM: E 586697m, N 679283m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.864297, -8.197556
Two areas were investigated in 1997 in advance of conservation by the National Monuments Service. The vegetation and topsoil on top of the eastern tower of the gatehouse were removed to reveal a curious arrangement. The tower had been reduced in height, probably during the 1690s, and, where necessary, had later been brought up again to a uniform height using narrower walls. The inserted vault within the tower had been sealed with clay and covered in slates held in position with iron nails set into the clay, giving a conical roof. A gully around the base of the roof, following the inner edge of the tower wall, led to a drain which discharged through the wall in front of the drawbridge. The top of the tower wall was sealed with a brown puddled clay which pitched inwards to the gully, and the gully itself was lined with similar material. No finds were made to date this arrangement, but it has the ‘feel’ of 19th-century work. The vault itself is believed to be inserted into the tower and could date from the same period, but it is felt that it probably dates from earlier in the post-medieval period.
The second area was a small blocked-up chamber in the western wall of the hall. This proved to contain a flight of steps leading from the ground floor of the hall to a garderobe set on the outside of the curtain-wall. One side of the garderobe chute had earlier been misidentified as the outer face of the western gate-tower, but the tower wall was identified to the east of the garderobe chute. This identification of the true tower wall means that the two towers are more similar in size than previously thought. A door from the centre of the western ground-floor room into the tower was also identified. This ground-floor room is believed to have been a parlour because it was equipped with high-quality stonework, a fireplace and, now, a private garderobe. A coin, under conservation at the time of writing but probably an Elizabethan sixpence, was the only significant find from the fill within the chamber.
Cragg, Birdhill, Co. Tipperary
