What is recorded here

Number 54 North Main Street still stands above the buried bones of Cromwell’s Magazine, a tower house torn down in 1835 but never forgotten. The late-medieval fireplace remains sealed inside the rear wall, waiting for hands that might still feel its heat. What the tower guarded, who stood at its crenellated edge, and why the town kept its name alive through every rebuild are no longer written in stone. They are written in the town’s refusal to let the tower disappear.

On North Main Street, Youghal. In 1835 a tower house, know as The Magazine and ‘still remembered as Cromwell’s residence' in 1856 (Hayman 1856, 15), was demolished and replaced by a three-storey end-of-terrace building (number 54 North Main Street). It was represented on a wood cut of 1850 as four-storied with a base batter and a crenellated parapet. An archaeological assessment (Noonan 2006b) revealed that 'the north boundary wall to the rear of the property…contains an infilled late medieval fireplace at first-floor level.' Three trenches were archaeologically excavated inside the existing street-fronting building and revealed 'substantial remains of the lower courses of the south and north walls, respectively, of the demolished tower-house.' A fourth trench, opened in the rear-yard, 'uncovered a layer of probable archaeological significance 0.6m beneath the floor level of a demolished 19th-century bakery'. The relationship between the tower house and the section of walling containing the late-medieval fireplace was not established. The late-medieval masonry was preserved in situ. (Zajac et al. 1995, 101-102)

A tower house known as The Magazine, associated with Cromwell's 17th-century military presence in Youghal, was replaced in 1835. It is remembered as a site linked to the English Civil War campaigns in Ireland.

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