Bawn

The National Monuments Service's description

Situated on a low natural rise of ground on the floodplains of the River Shannon which is located to the NW. The present Ireton's Castle was depicted as 'Derry Castle' on the 1st ed. OS 6-inch map and the Civil Survey refers to this site as DerrymcEgan castle (Simington 1934, vol. 2, 317). On the 1840 edition, Ireton's Castle was marked at a different location near to Belle Isle House where a nineteenth-century windmill (TN004-015) survives today. It is possible that the windmill was built on the site of Ireton's Castle some time in the nineteenth century. However, it is also possible that there may have been only one castle at the present location (i.e. on OS 3) and that it may have been refortified or rebuilt by Ireton around 1650 (Gleeson 1915, 316). The name of the castle may have then changed from Derry Castle to Ireton's Castle.
A seventeenth-century, three-storey, Z-plan fortified house (TN003-001001), built with roughly coursed limestone rubble. It consists of a central rectangular block with pear-shaped angle towers at NE and SW angles. The bawn wall runs off the NE angle tower and returns onto the NW angle of the building with nineteenth-century farmhouses built against the bawn wall. The fortified house is accessed from a round-arched rebated doorway, dressed with slight faint reaming across its surface, off-centre to the N on the W wall with a two-storey fore-building (Wall T 0.75m; int. dims. 3.9m x 4m) built up against the W face of the building. It is unclear if this fore-building is contemporary or a later addition to the fortified house.

The above description is derived from 'The Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary. Vol. 1 - North Tipperary' compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2002). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated in the light of recent research.

Date of upload/revision: 22 September 2008