Mail Coach Stables — Kilminchy

Housing estate known as Kilminchy Court now located on part of the Castle site, part of the walls of the garden survive and may preserve some of the orignal site of the castle known as Kilminchy Castle. In 1646 O'Neill captured the castle of Kilmensie where O'Neill and the Papal Nuncio resided while on their campaign (Kilminchy) (O'Hanlon and O'Leary 1914, vol. 2, 523, 526). According to O'Hanlon and O'Leary the last remains of Kilminchy Castle were the gateway into the house known as Kilminchy Building. This gateway was of 18th century date, the field tot he north of the gateway was enclosed by a high rubble limestone wall of which these flanking the entrance to the E and W still survive intact. In addition the remains of the N and E wall standing to a height of 2.9m survive in fragmentary condition all of which are approx. 0.6m thick. This wall is a demesne wall that dates from the 18th century. Kilminchy House and outbuildings are now destroyed with a housing estate located where these buildings were situated. One of these outhouses was a small single storey structure located to the NW of the walled garden which has a very pronounced base batter and large quoin stones and small rectangular opes of roughly cut limestone. The area around Kilminchy Building is probably the site of the Kilminchy Castle referred to in the seventeenth century. Archaeological monitoring was carried out on the site in 1999 by Finola O'Carroll under excavation licence no. 99E0390. Pre-development test-trenching was undertaken at Kilminchy, near Portlaoise, where an area of 150 acres of farmland is being developed. The land is gently undulating, and the soils are generally light and sandy. Some features had been noted in the extant farm buildings that suggested the possibility that they incorporated earlier structures (Sweetman et al. 1995). The work was undertaken at the request of the managing director, Mr Colman Buckley, who had noted an arc of a stone wall now incorporated into a modern hayshed, which may be part of Kilminchy Castle, location now unknown, or of the Mail Coach Stables that subsequently existed on the site. Five trenches were excavated at different locations on the site by mechanical digger using a ditching bucket. No material of medieval date was uncovered. The arc of a wall was not of medieval construction but was the inner face of a three-sided bay with projecting buttresses. This was constructed of roughly coursed random rubble, and the buttresses were both built of squared, dressed blocks. The wall survived to a depth below present ground level of 2.25m and was clearly a foundation level. This appeared from the map evidence to be the central bay of a building that also had projecting bays at either end. The wall had been broken through by the insertion of a slurry tank on the east side and was not followed on the west side. A survey of the cartographic evidence for the area showed that, while a possible tower-house was indicated on the Down Survey (1655-6) map of the area, the symbol for a 'gentleman's residence' was used on Taylor and Skinner's map of 1778 (Taylor and Skinner 1783), with the note 'FitzGerald Esq.'. Based on parallels with other such features, for example at Anneville, Co. Westmeath (Craig 1976, 103-4), a building date in the mid-18th century is likely. An ongoing programme of field-walking as the fields are ploughed is being carried out as part of the archaeological investigations of the site as a whole (Bennett 2000, 153). Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien Date of upload: 17 December 2007