2022:849 - Puck’s Castle, Rathmichael, Dublin

NMI Burial Excavation Records

County: Dublin Site name: Puck’s Castle, Rathmichael

Sites and Monuments Record No.: DU26-049 Licence number: 23E0529

Author: Antoine Giacometti

Site type: Castle (tower house)

Period/Dating: Late Medieval (AD 1100-AD 1599)

ITM: E 723185m, N 721648m

Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.230922, -6.154896

A Community Monuments Fund grant was awarded in 2023 for conservation and repairs at Puck’s Castle, and a geophysical survey. These works were archaeologically monitored during late 2023.

Puck’s castle is a three-storey tower-house (10m by 7m) without a vault on the slopes of Rathmichael Hill overlooking Shankill and the former approaches into the Pale from the Wicklow Mountains. The western quarter of the castle is a separate unit (2.5m by 7m) containing the entrance, lobby, two slights of straight stairs providing access to each floor, spiral stair in projecting tower to roof walk, and access to two small rooms above and below the staircase. The stairs are to the left as you enter the door. The eastern three-quarters of the space is given over to three large rooms over three floors. The lowest floor is lit by narrow slit loops, and the second floor is lit by much larger windows with window seats (the windows on the first floor have been heavily remodelled in the c. 18th century and their medieval form is uncertain). The first and second floors have access to a projecting garderobe tower in the northeast. The eastern windows at first and second floor, and probably at ground floor, were blocked, most likely in the later medieval or early post-medieval period, and replaced by a masonry chimney flue.

Morphologically, Puck’s Castle fits firmly in the tradition of the pan-European chamber-tower, and from an Irish perspective is classed as a ‘tower house’ dating to the 15th and 16th centuries. However, the castle has no vault, one of the classic features of tower houses. It also has evidence for plank centring, a building technique usually dated in Ireland to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While there are no dated examples of plank-centred vaulting later than the 14th century in Ireland, it is not impossible that a small group of castles in the southern Pale (Kilgobbin, Kindlestown and Puck’s) were constructed using plank-centred vaulting (or retaining the imprints of it) into the fifteenth century after its use had stopped elsewhere in Ireland.

Although Puck’s Castle does not fit neatly into the established medieval castle typologies, it is a late medieval tower house set within a complex of other structures with evidence for long-lived occupation until the 18th century, both in the chamber tower and other buildings surrounding it.

Archaeology Plan, 32 Fitzwilliam Place Dublin 2