2000:App1 - COLLOONEY, Sligo

Malachy Conway’s report on test excavations at Collooney (Excavations 1999, 274, 99E0652) is under the heading ‘Infantry barrack, possible’. I completed an assessment of this site for the owner in 1999. The site for which planning permission was being sought was not that of the supposed possible infantry barrack but a sunken field situated two fields further to the north. However, despite much local and library research (see references below), I found no evidence for the supposed barracks here or anywhere else in Collooney. Dr Kieran D. O’Connor (pers. comm.) dismissed the location as being unsuitable from a military point of view for a barrack of any sort as it is overlooked by high ground on several sides. More likely it was a walled or kitchen garden, and the foundations of buildings along the walls confirm this.

The castle seems to have escaped being marked on any map. The structure is not on the 1838 or subsequent OS maps, and it is not in the RMP Register, despite reference to it in MacLysaght (1967) and O’Dowd (1991).

What I did find was that the garage at street level is built on what is locally believed to have been Richard Coote’s castle of 1655, the largest 17th-century house in County Sligo, although nothing of it is to be seen today and no indicators of it were found in the test excavations. The known 17th-century houses in County Sligo are Castlebaldwin, Ballincar (=Cregg), Ardtermon, Inishcrone, Cottlestown (=Castletown O’Dowd), Tanrego, Templehouse, perhaps Moygara, perhaps Longford, and alterations to Ballymote Castle; Ballinafad is a small military castle of 1590.

References
MacLysaght, E. 1967 Seventeenth-century hearth money rolls with full transcript relating to County Sligo. Analecta Hibernica 24.
O’Dowd, M. 1991 Power, politics and land: early modern Sligo. Belfast.

Bóthar An Corran, Keash, Co. Sligo