Gaol

Situated on relatively high ground to the NW of Monaghan town. There was a small settlement at Monaghan in 1589-91 when the lord deputy, Sir William FitzWilliam, took advantage of a Mac Mahon dispute to establish a garrison here at the friary (MO009-060002-). The garrison was probably abandoned after the battle of Clontibret in 1595 but it was re-established by John Berkley in 1602 (Livingstone 1982, 90-4). In 1604 Sir Edward Blayney was appointed seneschal or governor of the county and the garrison, and two years later he received extensive lands around the town and around what would become Castleblayney (Duffy 1981. 14, fig. 5). He commenced to build a house (MO009-060003-) for himself at Monaghan. In 1606 Sir John Davies, the attorney general, described the town as ‘…consisting of divers scattered cabins or cottages, whereof the most part was possessed by the cast soldiers of that garrison. In the northmost part thereof there is a little fort, which is kept by the foot company of Sir Edward Blayney, who is seneschal or governor of the county by patent’. A map of Richard Bartlett of c. 1602-03 shows the town as a fortified enclosure with fourteen thatched houses and eight bastions. This is a fanciful idealised fortified town, which did not exist at Monaghan then, but the plan does show the ruins of the friary (MO009-060002-) in the foreground and this fort that was mentioned by Davies in the background. Hayes-McCoy (1960, 16) suggests that this fort was built in 1602. Locally it was thought to have been where a new jail had been built in 1824 and the County Hospital is now. The last remnant of it was a tree-covered mound recorded by Coote (1801, 171) and in 1835 in the Ordinance Survey Letters (Herity 2012, 176). This is followed by Lewis (1837, 2, 384) with the additional information that silver coins had been found here including one of Henry VIII and another of James I. The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Monaghan' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1986). See the attached view of Monaghan town by Bartlett (c. 1602) with the fort in the background.