Milltown Castle, Co. Louth
A chance encounter with an interesting tower house
One of the great pleasures of roaming around the Irish countryside is catching glimpses of the unexpected. In this instance, a friend and I were visiting a number of villages in Louth and Monaghan when we unexpectedly came across an interesting sight. Just outside of Dromiskin we spotted the upper storey of a tower house poking above the treetops. A slam on the brakes and a few quick photos from the car later, we were on our way again.
Two eye-catching details of this tower house are the rounded corners/towers and the fact that it appears to retain some of its bawn (the walled area around the castle), incorporated into more modern surrounding farmyard walls and buildings.
Casey and Rowan1 inform us that the tower house was apparently inhabited until the mid-19th century and is traditionally one of the earliest fortified tower houses in the Pale. A two-storey farmhouse was formally attached to the tower house and seems to have served as a domestic “extension” up to modern times when it was demolished and replaced with a larger, detached, house. A photo of Milltown castle with the attached domestic range can be viewed here: https://rsai.locloudhosting.net/items/show/31810
Finding a solid date for the tower house proved elusive, with the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries all being suggested in places. Personally, I would suggest somewhere in the earlier half of that date range.
The National Monuments Service entry (LH012-061001) provides further detail on the architectural details of the tower house and bawn:
Built of limestone and greywacke boulders, slabs and blocks, with projecting towers at the W and E angles. The castle is so orientated that each angle more or less coincides with a point of the compass, but for convenience the NE façade is taken as the N wall, SW as S, etc. The towers on the diagonally opposing angles project in one direction only: that at the NE contains the remains of the stairwell while the one at the SW has the garderobes. Entry to the tower house is gained at present through a modern doorway in the E angle-tower but the original entrance is just to the S of it in the E wall. This doorway originally led to the barrel-vaulted area and to the stairwell immediately N of the entrance. The doorway to the stairwell has a single lintel stone over, while the outer one and that leading to the barrel vault have two-centred arches built with small greywacke slabs. There is a small murder hole just inside the doorway but access to it is now blocked by modern alterations, which have also involved the removal of the lower part of the stone staircase (i.e. up to just beyond the first-floor level), the insertion of wooden steps and the building of a new entrance to the barrel-vaulted area.
The internal area of the first and second floor levels has been altered by the insertion of modern fireplaces in the SW angle and by the widening of the doorways and the opes. The garderobe at first-floor level has a simple hole in the floor without provision for seating. That at second-floor level is not accessible owing to the dangerous condition of the modern floor-boards.
There is a stone roof, built of slabs in a beehive manner, over the first-floor garderobe. At all levels there are opes in the N, S and W walls while there is one in the E wall at second-floor level only. The only original unaltered opes appear to be those at ground level which are double-splayed, and two at second-floor level with unusual concave sides in their embrasures, one being in the E wall and the other in the W. There are squinches in the NW and SE inner angle to carry the wall-walk. At roof level there are stepped battlements and stone steps which lead to the second-storey level of the corner-towers, similar to those in Termonfeckin Castle (LH022-041010-). The wall-walk stones oversail the castle walls by between 0.05m and 0.10m, and there are drain holes in the base of the parapet. The SW angle-tower has a hole in the floor at wall-walk level which leads to a spout projecting from the S side of the tower at third-floor level. This may have acted as a crude type of garderobe for those on sentry duty.
At the parapet level there is a chimney breast in the S wall which is carried on corbels. The remains of the bawn wall can clearly be seen in the modern farm buildings. Its N wall fronts onto the roadway while the W portion returns from it and joins onto the NW angle of the tower house. The masonry of the SE angle has been broken to a height of c. 2.8m above the ground, which is about the same height as that of the remaining bawn wall at the N side. It would therefore appear that the bawn wall originally also joined the castle at the SE angle. A modern N-S wall which bounds the present grounds of the house appears to occupy the line of the original E wall of the bawn. (Wright 1758, bk II, 5, pl. II). The above description is derived from both the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Louth' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1986) and the 'Archaeological Survey of County Louth' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1991). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated in the light of recent research.
Text Copyright Government of Ireland/National Monuments Service. Reproduced from the Historic Enviroment Viewer under CC BY 4.0.
Milltown Castle has been featured on The Irish Aesthete and Irish Antiquities websites. Links to these are below. The Irish Antiquities one, in particular, is worth a look for Brian T McElherron’s excellent photographs.
There is also an interesting entry in the School’s Collection in the National Folklore Collection that is worth a read. Typically, most mentions of tunnels can be disregarded as fanciful. This instance is no exception.
Casey, Christine, and Alistair John Rowan. North Leinster (The Buildings of Ireland). Penguin Books, 1993.