Building, Castlewarren, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Utility Structures
A three-metre-square building surrounded by bog is an odd thing to encounter in County Kilkenny, but that is roughly what survives at Castlewarren, where a cluster of foundations sits marooned in marshy ground on notoriously poor, peaty soil.
What makes the position stranger still is the contrast it presents: the site is completely enclosed by wetland and yet commands an excellent long-range view to the south-west, down the valley below. Whoever chose this spot understood something about watching distance even if the immediate ground offered little in the way of comfort or productivity.
The smallest of the surviving structures is a square foundation, three metres by three metres, sitting within the western angle of a bawn. A bawn is an enclosing defensive wall or bank, typically associated with an Irish tower house or castle complex, designed to protect livestock and outbuildings as much as the main residence. Here the bawn is defined by an earthen bank roughly 0.7 metres wide and 0.5 metres high, modest in scale but still legible in the ground. Beyond it, in the southern quadrant of the site, the foundations of several outer buildings survive, and among them is a larger structure that may represent the remains of Castle Warren itself, a building recorded on the nineteenth-century six-inch Ordnance Survey maps. That the castle appears on those maps but is now reduced to earthwork foundations gives some sense of how thoroughly the site has declined, though the marshy enclosure has likely helped preserve what little does remain by discouraging disturbance.
