2007:1770 - Castle Hill, Dungannon, Tyrone

Excavations were undertaken at Castle Hill, Drumcoo, Dungannon, between 16 October and 2 November 2007. The excavations were conducted jointly by the Environment and Heritage Service: Built Heritage (EHS), the Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork (CAF) at Queen’s University Belfast and Channel 4’s Time Team (see Donnelly, Murray and Logue 2007). Six excavation trenches were opened, with the largest investigation undertaken on the hill’s summit (Trench 1) and five smaller trenches located downslope across the hill’s east-facing aspect (Trenches 2 to 6).
A pictorial map of 1602 by Richard Bartlett, an English cartographer, shows the O’Neill tower-house that once stood on Castle Hill, while a detail included on another map, drawn by Nicholas Pynnar in 1624, depicts the tower-house surrounded by a fortification with spear-shaped bastions, constructed after the collapse of O’Neill rule in Ulster. In 2003 Robert Chapple of NAC Ltd undertook the excavation of a series of test-pits in advance of the erection of a security fence around a telecommunications mast on the hilltop (Chapple 2003). Chapple’s work indicated that structural remains and archaeological strata survived, and in his Test-Pit S4 a base-battered wall was encountered, some 1.6m thick, which was considered to be of probable medieval date (ibid.).
As part of an episode of Channel 4’s Time Team series, scheduled monument consent was obtained to enable an area of c. 36m2 to be excavated within the security compound on the summit of Castle Hill to further investigate the nature of the wall discovered in 2003. Within this trench (Trench 1), two heavily robbed mortared stone walls were uncovered and these represented part of the curtain wall and spear-shaped bastion belonging to the early 17th-century fort, as depicted in Pynnar’s sketch. The remains of a base-battered wall to the rear of the fort’s curtain wall were also encountered, and were identified as the lowest courses of one of the walls of the medieval tower-house. The evidence retrieved during the excavation has therefore demonstrated the accuracy of Pynnar’s depiction of the site in 1624.
The hilltop site had subsequently been modified for use with artillery, probably in the mid- to late 17th century. The interior of the tower-house was revetted with stones bedded in clay and the interiors of both the tower-house and the spear-shaped bastion had then been infilled with orange clay. Both the tower-house and the fort surrounding it subsequently underwent episodes of stone robbing before becoming buried in mortar-rich demolition debris and other levelling-up layers. These deposits post-date the abandonment of the site, and took place in advance of the construction of a fine country house by the Knox-Hannyngton family in the late 18th century. Map evidence shows that the rear of this ‘castle’ directly overlay the location of the old tower-house and early 17th-century fort but any trace of this building was demolished during the 20th-century occupation of the hilltop by the British Army and the RUC. The area was subsequently covered in a thick layer of hardcore, concrete and tarmac to facilitate the construction of a helicopter landing pad.
In addition to the hilltop excavation, five smaller trenches were also opened across the east-facing aspect of Castle Hill to investigate anomalies identified through geophysical survey and also to attempt to locate some of the features indicated in the historic cartographic sources. Trench 2 was opened close to the base of the hill to investigate the ditch or moat illustrated on Bartlett’s map of 1602, which is depicted as enclosing both the elevated site of the O’Neill castle and a number of houses. A substantial ditch was discovered and excavated to a depth of 1.6m (although not bottomed), along with an adjacent metalled surface which may represent an earlier routeway into the complex. No datable artefacts were found in the fill of the ditch and this proved also to be the case for a second possible ditch uncovered on the upper south-eastern slopes of the hill (Trench 4). Trench 5 was opened to investigate the nature of the boundary wall along the eastern edge of the property, while in Trench 3 a revetment wall was uncovered. The wall broadly followed the contours of the hill, and was associated with tumble, a stone-lined drain running at an angle from the wall upslope, and a stony spread interpreted as a garden surface or path. A second stone-lined drain was also found further south in Trench 6; all of these elements have been interpreted as garden features associated with the Knox-Hannyngton occupancy of the hilltop.
While animal bones, oyster shells and pieces of clay pipe and glass were found in the majority of the trenches, the main concentrations of artefacts were found in Trench 1 and included two lead pistol shots, a George III coin, a possible gun flint and part of a 16th/early 17th-century German stoneware flagon. In addition, sherds of medieval Ulster coarseware pottery (c. 1250–1650) were found in the lower hill-wash deposits in Trench 3.
References
Chapple, R.M. 2003 Excavations at Castle Hill, Dungannon, Co. Tyrone. Archaeology Ireland 17(3), 24–9.
Donnelly, C., Murray, E. and Logue, P. 2007 Excavating with Time Team at Castle Hill, Dungannon, Co. Tyrone. Archaeology Ireland 21(4), 16–19.
Colm Donnelly and Emily Murray, Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork (CAF), School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University, Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, and Paul Logue,