County: Wexford Site name: Johnstown Castle, Johnstown
Sites and Monuments Record No.: WX042-017 Licence number: 16E0658
Author: Dave Pollock
Site type: Medieval tower-house (vicinity of)
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 701970m, N 616860m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.293930, -6.505125
Johnstown Castle is a Gothic-style adventure of the early 19th century. It incorporated a late medieval tower-house, but lost it in the mid 20th century, leaving a hollow in the north front. The east end of the present castle is cellared, and a tunnel with side chambers runs east from the building. To open the tunnel as a visitor attraction an additional short length of tunnel was needed as an emergency escape route, and ahead of this two small test trenches were cut in April 2017, to assess the survival of features associated with the tower-house.
One test trench cut a deep layer of rubble and construction waste over clean subsoil (clay over laminated sand/gravel), the other cut similar rubble over the fabric of a cellar roof or ventilation duct (early 19th century), and old soil over clean subsoil. Nothing in the soil or underlying subsoil suggested that a bawn had extended this far from the tower-house.
Over the following days a number of test trenches were cut in and around one of the 19th-century farmyards at Johnstown Castle, where the Irish Agricultural Museum intend to upgrade visitor facilities. Below the present concrete yard surface an original cobbled surface overlay a considerable depth of imported clay and silt over peat and silt associated with a former lake.
Stradbally
