2000:0115 - BANDON: Town Walls (Gully Townland), Cork

It is intended to construct a new shopping centre in an area known locally as the ‘Bogs’, to the west of Bandon town. The historic town wall lies partly within the area of the proposed development and elsewhere forms the eastern boundary of the development site. In order to facilitate the development of a conservation strategy for the town wall, it was necessary to test excavate the area abutting the wall. The wall is breached in two areas, and advantage will be taken of these breaches to connect the shopping centre to McSweeney Quay (formerly Burlington Quay), to Weir Street and to South Main Street.

The location of the original early 17th-century town wall is in no doubt. It can be deduced by comparing two maps from the 1620s with Bernard Scale’s map of 1775 and with the Ordnance Survey maps. The town was not laid out, nor the walls built, exactly as planned in the 1620s maps, and both are best regarded as blueprints for the design. In particular, the town wall was not built in a straight line on the western side but at an oblique angle from the weir, leading south-west, as shown in Scale’s map and as represented by the extant remains.

Bandon was founded as two separate self-contained towns in the early 1600s; the town on the southern bank of the River Bandon was called Bandon-bridge, and that on the northern bank was Coolfada. There were two separate suburbs on the southern side of Bandon-bridge, known as Ballymodan and Irishtown.

By 1618 all four segments of the town were united under the control of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork. It was at this time that the town walls were constructed. Bandon was an important centre for the Munster Plantations and was promoted as a military outpost—hence the importance of the walls in the early 17th century. A description by a resident, Richard Cox, in the 1680s describes the town as ‘built within the memory of man and walled about with a handsome and strong wall of lime and stone, and fortified by eleven flankers and three of the stateliest gatehouses or castles in any town in Europe’ (quoted in O’Flanagan 1988, 4). Bennett (1869, 67) described the town walls of Bandon as under construction in 1621 but noted a reference of 1616 describing a house as ‘built with out the walls, by the west gate’. He described the walls as being ‘mainly composed of a thick, black slate. There [sic] were generally about nine feet thick, and varied in height from thirty feet to fifty. There were six bastions—one at each corner of the walls, one in the river, and one midway on the south wall.’

The testing revealed that the town wall of Bandon is 2.47m wide and stands to c. 1.7–1.9m below present ground level. The wall face is rendered with hard lime mortar below ground level, i.e. where it is protected from the weather. It is likely that the entire outer (western) wall face was rendered originally. The upstanding ‘outer wall’ represents the outer wall face; the space between the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ walls is the core of the original wall. The ‘inner’ wall, which is now restored by the Office of Public Works as the Garda compound, is the original inner wall face. The wall survives beneath ground level in the areas where modern breaches have been cut through it.

References
Bennett, G. 1869 The history of Bandon and the principal towns in the West Riding of Co. Cork.
O’Flanagan, P. 1988 Bandon. Irish Historic Towns Atlas No. 3. Dublin.

312 Bruach na Laoi, Union Quay, Cork