Deer park, Farranrory, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Estate Features

Deer park, Farranrory, Co. Tipperary

On a south-east-facing slope of upland Tipperary grassland, a low limestone wall runs quietly alongside a castle driveway, largely unremarked and easy to pass without a second thought.

What it may represent, however, is the surviving boundary of a medieval or post-medieval deer park, a managed enclosure designed to contain and hunt deer for the lords of a tower house. Deer parks were a statement of wealth and jurisdiction as much as a practical resource, requiring significant labour to construct and maintain, and relatively few of their physical traces survive legibly in the Irish landscape.

The wall in question runs parallel to the south-west of the driveway leading up to Farranrory Castle, a tower house sitting immediately to the north-east. Tower houses, the compact fortified residences typical of late medieval Ireland, were often the centres of small agricultural and hunting estates, and a deer park attached to one would have been a mark of considerable local status. The enclosure suggested by the wall is substantial, measuring approximately 375 metres north-west to south-east and 560 metres north-east to south-west. The wall itself stands roughly a metre high with a thickness of around half a metre, built in a roughly coursed limestone style. Its relationship to the deer park is confirmed, at least in outline, by a map of the coal district of Killenaule dated to 1824, held in the National Library of Ireland, which shows the boundaries of the park encompassing the land adjoining the south-west of the tower house. That a map produced for an industrial survey of a coal district should also happen to preserve the footprint of a much older aristocratic enclosure is one of those quiet accidents of documentary history.

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Pete F
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