Annamult Castle (in ruins) — Annamult

On the brow of a W-facing slope with good views to NE-S and SW-W-N. The castle is indicated on the Down Survey (1655-6) barony map of Sheelogher/‘Sheelelogher’ (Hibernia Regnum, courtesy of Trinity College Dublin). The OS Letters (1839) mention that this castle is also known as the Friar’s Castle and is located c. 100m N of a large medieval barn (KK023-022----), known as the Friar’s Barn (O’Flanagan 1930, vol. 1, 274 (92)). According to Carrigan (1905, vol. 3, 373), in the early 13th century the townland of Annamult is found, ‘among the temporal possessions of Graiguenamanagh, otherwise Duiske Abbey, and it continued so till the suppression of the monasteries, by Henry VIII., in 1540’. An atypical rectangular, four-storey tower house (ext. dims. 12.4m N-S x 10m E-W) with external base-batter. It is constructed of roughly coursed limestone rubble, containing putlog holes, with larger blocks utilised at quoins. The E and S face are heavily ivy clad. The tower house was entered at ground-floor level (int. dims. 7.5m N-S x 4.7m E-W) via door embrasures, now collapsed, at the N end of the E wall, with an intact murder-hole, accessed at second-floor level, in the lobby area between the main doorway and the entrance to the ground-floor chamber. The entrance lobby also gives access to a mural stair which rises in the E wall leading to all the upper floors and to a stair in the N wall which rises to first-floor level. The second-floor chamber could also be reached via a doorway in the S wall of the ground-floor chamber, which leads to a mural stair rising in the S wall. In the E and S walls straight mural staircases lead to the first floor. Ground-floor mural chambers survive in the S wall (dims. 2.4m x 0.8m), at the S end of the E wall (dims. 5.1m x 1m) and beneath the staircase in the N wall (3.5m x 1m); all three are lit by a single loop and accessed by a small lintelled doorway. The ground floor chamber was lit by three single-light windows in the W wall, all within flat-arched embrasures with one retaining traces of plank-centring.  The barrel-vaulted first-floor chamber was entered via a poorly preserved door embrasure accessed from the mural passage in the N wall. The first-floor rested on a wooden floor supported by three large corbels, two in the E wall and one in the S end of the W wall. Joist-holes for the floor timbers are also evident. A staircase at the S end of the E wall gives access to the second floor which features a poorly preserved fireplace with tapering flue in the NW corner with two loops in the back wall of the fireplace (Salter 2004, 56). At this level the murder-hole opening is in the N end of the E wall. The W jamb of a partially collapsed window embrasure in the S wall contains a lintelled doorway accessing an L-shaped mural chamber. A second ruinous mural chamber, lit by a pointed single-light window, now largely collapsed, in the S end of the E wall may have provided a second entrance to this floor. Ivy-clad, the third floor is inaccessible due to the collapse of the staircase. The windows at this level are poorly preserved, with the remains of two in the W wall and one in the N wall. A corbel projects out from the S wall. A tower indicated on the 1st (1839) ed. OS 6-inch map c. 70m to the NW, but no longer standing, was probably the NW angle tower of an associated bawn (KK023-084002-). See attached: KK023-084001-_01 Photograph of the external W face of tower house KK023-084001-_02 Photograph of the internal SW angle at 2nd-floor level KK023-084001-_03 Extract from Down Survey (1655-6) barony map of Sheelogher/‘Sheelelogher’ (Hibernia Regnum, courtesy of Trinity College Dublin) Compiled by: Jean Farrelly