County: Cork Site name: BARRYSCOURT CASTLE, Carrigtwohill
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 96E0238
Author: Dave Pollock
Site type: Castle - tower house and Bawn
Period/Dating: Late Medieval (AD 1100-AD 1599)
ITM: E 582257m, N 573281m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 51.911390, -8.257880
A further season of excavations ahead of consolidation at Barryscourt (see Excavations 1996, 10-11, and Excavations 1997, 9, for previous reports), funded by the National Monuments Service, saw a large part of the bawn opened and a number of outstanding problems solved.
It is unlikely that any buildings on site pre-date the large tower-house (probably of 16th-, perhaps of 15th-century construction). A contemporary building has now been identified, probably a kitchen. The building is largely robbed but had mortared stone walls and a battered foot to the gable dropping down into a moat surrounding the site. There is no indication that the moat pre-dates the tower-house.
The kitchen was extended and then damaged, probably in 1581, but was rebuilt shortly thereafter with an enclosing mortared bawn wall and a range of buildings to the west. The new range included a hall, which appears to have been largely timbered on an insubstantial unmortared stone footing.
Garden beds and planting holes (several for trees?) have been identified in the bawn, within 10m of the hall. The arrangement clearly respects the new range and in part post-dates the kitchen. The pattern of beds is not symmetrical but provides indications of the position of the hall entrance.
At an early stage this corner of the bawn was enclosed from the rest of the yard (taking in an area much larger than the garden). At some stage (perhaps in the early 17th century) the far end of the enclosure was raised as a large platform, revetted with substantial mortared walls, perhaps as a garden feature, perhaps as an artillery platform.
33 Woodlawn, Cashel, Co. Tipperary
