Sketrick Castle

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Ruins of a four storey tower house and bawn of probable 14th or 15th century origin, set on the E (inland) coast of Sketrick Island, next to a causeway to the mainland.

The structure is of split stone rubble construction and is rectangular in plan form (c.16m x 9m). At the highest point the walls measure 17.5m and are 1.4m thick. Most of the E wall survives and has several narrow openings, but little of the N wall is standing and almost nothing of those to the S and W. There is a low bawn wall to the N and E and a narrow stone lined (and partly covered) trench, carrying spring water, to the E.

The outlines of various chambers/entrances are discernible within the ruin, with narrow chambers to the N side and the remains of the (vaulted stone) stone first floor. The staircase apparently rose through the E wall. There appears to be the remains of a NE corner [?]chimney piece to the second floor.

Sections of the walls appear to have been repaired recently.

This ruin is now in state care.

Historical information

The first recorded mention of Sketrick Castle occurs in the Annals of the Four Masters under the entry for the year 1470 when it was captured by Henry O’Neill and handed of to the head of the MacQuillans (whose ancestors may indeed have built the castle). In a crown survey of ordnance dating from the early 1500s it is noted that the Earl of Kildare (whose family received a grant of land in Down in 1506), had taken ‘one great pott-gonne of Irne…to ye Castell of Scatryke in the Northe of Ireland’. Sketrick was captured in 1556 by John Prowse, the constable of Carlingford castle. In the later 16th (or early 17th) century the castle came into the hands of the Savages of the Ards, one of whose descendants appears to have been in possession of the whole island right up until the 1800s.
The castle is described in the OS Memoirs of 1833 as ‘a plain square building, 40 feet high’ with an entrance on the west face, but ‘unroofed and open from the top to the ground’. It remained in roughly the same state until 1896 when ‘the south-western angle fell with a great crash one calm spring day, shaking the castle and raising a tall column of white dust’.

The ruin is now in state care.

References- Primary source
1 Annala Rioghachta Eireann: annals of the kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters from the earliest period to the year 1616, ed. John O’Donovan, 7 vols (reprint Dublin 1990). Copy in QUB.
2 City Hall Dublin City Treasury Accounts, 1540-1613 (quoted in ASCD p.250 see ref.2 Below).
3 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), p. 89. The memoirs also include a rough sketch of the castle as it stood in 1833.
4 PRONI OS maps 1st ed. 1834, Co. Down 17.

Secondary sources.
1 G.F. Savage-Armstrong 'A genealogical history of the Savage family in Ulster, being a revision and enlargement of certain chapters of “The Savages of the Ards”' (London 1906), pp.334-35.
2 'Archaeological Survey of County Down' (Belfast, 1966), pp. 250-52.
3 A.J. Hughes and R.J. Hannan 'Place-Names of Northern Ireland Vol. Two, County Down II- The Ards', pp.25-26

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Ruined remains of a four storey tower house, possibly originally constructed in the 14th or 15th century. Much of the building collapsed in 1896 and now all that is left is the E wall and the NE corner, with the remains of a bawn wall and a narrow stone lined ditch (for a stream) to the rear.