Settlement cluster in Knowth

The Cistercians of Mellifont abbey retained their land at Knowth until the monastery was suppressed in 1539, after which the Knowth land was leased to a succession of investors including Laurence Townley, and William Brabazon, head of the Irish exchequer, who held it until 1566 when it passed to Edward Moore. This family would hold extensive estates in the Meath / Louth area for generations. A patent of 1612 confirmed the possessions of Garrett Moore, Baron of Mellifont, who became Viscount Moore of Drogheda in 1621. Amongst the estates was the parish of Monknewtown which included Knowth townland, but this territory incorporated what is now Crewbane townland to the west. The victory of the Protestant King William III at the battle of the Boyne in 1689 secured the estates of the loyal Moore family for another century and more, although Knowth would be sold by them in 1729 to Andrew Caldwell. Caldwell was related by marriage to the Campbells who leased Newgrange from the Moore estate, and he would later purchase this townland and the neighbouring Balfeddock. This unified holding was surveyed for him by Richard Scalé (NLI: 21F 78 (63)) in 1766 (Stout 2002, 130-1). The land itself was farmed by tenants of various degrees, from large strong farmers to small cottiers, who generally declined in status and wealth as the eighteenth century progressed. This is the period when the landscape took on much of its present appearance, although the details of land divisions were rarely recorded in full. There was ample opportunity for sub-letting, and leaseholdings were frequently subdivided in order to support a growing agricultural population with limited economic opportunities that could be sustained in small plots on the land thanks to potatoes. By the middle of the eighteenth century the Berrill family were the chief tenants at Knowth, where a cluster of houses was developing along the road just NE of the great mound as recorded in Scalé’s survey. This area was being leased by Andrew Maguire in 1766 but in the early nineteenth century much of the area N of the road was let by the Caldwells to John Cooper while the Maguire family continued to hold most of their acreage south of the road. (Jenkins 2008) The cluster of houses at Knowth, first recorded in Scalé’s map, was one of several in the area developing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There was also a clustered settlement at Newgrange farm, another at Craud, and possibly another at Ballinacrad. At Knowth, according to the Scalé survey, there were four houses on the NE side of the public road and five on the SW side. Two of the latter were not at the roadside but further into the field with the great mound. This scheme is replicated in the 1836 edition of the OS 6-inch map where there is a small yard fronting onto the SW side of the road as it changes direction from NW-SE to SW-NE. Knowth House, the home of the Maguire family, is identified on the map and was described in the OS Name Books as ‘a ground floor slated farm house’ (ibid. 210), typical of the houses of strong farmers of the era. By 1913 when the next large scale OS maps were made the houses on the NE side of the road are either derelict or incorporated into outhouses of Knowth House, which had been rebuilt as the present two story, four by two bay house in the 1870s (ibid. 220). In contrast all the structures depicted on the SW side of the road had been removed. Eogan was not able to excavate on the sites of the mapped houses SW of the road, but test-trenching in the area between the mound and the road produced evidence of seven other post-medieval structures that did not appear on any survey, showing just how incomplete the mapping evidence of a well-documented area can be. The houses (max. ext. dims c. 10m x c. 5m) have drystone bases to the walls, although it is possible that these are just the bases of cob or mud walls. Some of the houses have rounded external corners as some of the medieval houses had. One of the post-medieval houses, No. 15, is just SE of the great mound and was fully excavated. It is rectangular (int. dims c. 4.3m plus ENE-WSW; c. 3.3m NNW-SSE) defined by double-faced walls (Wth c. 0.8m; H c. 0.5m) with sharp external corners. Its E wall is entirely missing but it has a paved floor. No features such as a doorway, hearth or window is identified, but it does re-use a stone with megalithic art, which is placed in a prominent position on the outer face of the N wall as well as a medieval quernstone. This house is conserved. (Eogan 2012, 187-200) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 21 September 2020 See the attached illustration: _1 adapted from Scale (1766) in Knowth 5, Fig. 6:4