Castle (site of)

Incorporated into the present Dominican Priory, all that survives of the Archbishop's palace of the later medieval period is this gate house (Handcock, 1991, 32, 3rd ed). It is rectangular in plan, rising to four storeys with a stair turret in NW angle and an external base batter visible on the E side. It is built of coursed limestone blocks with hammer dressing on the quoins and windows and was considerably altered in the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a vault over the ground floor, which has been converted into a chapel with Gothic windows inserted. Access to upper floors is from a stair turret, which is entered at ground level on S side and is lit by single slit opes. A fireplace has been inserted into N wall of the first floor. The interior is lit by round-headed windows in the four walls, that in the W serves as a doorway. The third floor has a vaulted roof running on an E-W axis, which is probably modern (Ball 1899, 100; Price 1942, 39-41). A stone head was found reused in one of the walls of the stone stair by Sir John Lentaigne (O'Curry 1837, 31; Ball 1899, 101). The tooling evidence helps assign a sixteenth century date to the tower(Bradley & King 1988, 332), although this may just be evidence of later insertions into an earlier building. Compiled by Geraldine Stout