Castle - tower house

The National Monuments Service's description

Situated on a natural rise of ground on the floodplains of the River Shannon which flows to the W of the site. Portland Castle or the castle of Portaulochain (The Bank of the Wild Fowl) was built by Eoghan O'Madden in the fourteenth century (Gleeson 1915, vol. 2, 315-16). The annals (AFM) record in the year 1441 that the castle of Portland was taken by William Mac Uachtrach (ibid., 315-16) and the OS Letters note that the castle was captured by Redmund Burke in 1600 (O'Flanagan 1930, vol. 2, 69). The Civil Survey (1654-6) records the castle as an 'old stumpe of a castle close by the shannon side' (Simington 1934, vol. 2, 319). The site now consists of the poorly preserved remains of a rectangular tower (ext. dims. 10.4m x 7.2m) whose side walls survive on average to 1.7m high. The walls were constructed with roughly coursed limestone rubble with slight base-batter; the interior is covered in rubble infill. A portion of the doorway sits on the top of the rubble infill consisting of a rebated punch-dressed stone voussoir with reamed margins of late sixteenth/seventeenth-century style.

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

References

Gleeson, Rev. J. 1915 (Reprint 1982, 2 vols. with intro. and biblio. by George Cunningham) History of the Ely O'Carroll territory or Ancient Ormond. Kilkenny. Roberts Books.

Simington, R.C. (ed.) 1934 The Civil survey, AD 1654-1656. Vol. II: county of Tipperary - Western and Northern baronies. Dublin. Irish Manuscripts Commission.

O'Flanagan, Rev. M. (Compiler) 1930 Letters containing information relative to the antiquities of the county of Tipperary collected during the progress of the Ordnance Survey in 1840. Bray.