2001:1184 - SLIGO: Gate Lodge, Quay Street, Sligo

The Medieval Urban Survey suggests that the Gate Lodge and adjacent Town Hall may have been constructed on the site of Sligo Castle. The proposed extension to the Gate Lodge, to the south of the Town Hall, was tested, with quite convincing evidence for an earlier building, possibly the castle, coming to light.

Examination of the documentary sources revealed details of a plan of the 17th-century Cromwellian Ordnance Fort at Sligo, the southern end of which consisted of two rectangular rooms, the northern one noted as a store, the southern one annotated as ‘Store’ on the property of Mr Coghan — Merchant. Interestingly, the width of both rooms is recorded: the southern store measures 10ft while that to the north measures 19ft, equating to roughly 3m and 5.5m respectively. The results from the archaeological testing showed that the gap between the two walls uncovered was slightly over 5m, suggesting that it is the northern storeroom of the castle which was uncovered. The fact that the two walls were substantially different in width, slightly less than 1m in one case and 0.4m in the other, suggests that the more massive southern example may have been an original exterior wall of the castle, with the merchant’s store added on at a later date.

The ground towards the northern end of the test area was severely disturbed by the construction of the basements associated with the later Town Hall. Such were the scale and extent of the excavations associated with the Town Hall that it is likely that it is only at this southern end of the area that further evidence of the earlier castle will survive.

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