Building, Ballynahinch, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Utility Structures
What survives at Ballynahinch in County Tipperary is, by any measure, very little: a fragment of south gable rising to little more than a metre and a half, a stretch of collapsed limestone rubble, and a bawn wall whose inner face has been patched over with concrete.
Yet the smallness of the remains makes the documentary evidence around them more striking by contrast. By the mid-seventeenth century, a once-inhabited complex had already been reduced to a demolished castle, a bawn, a thatched house, and a few cabins.
The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 recorded that the Countess of Ormond held the lands in 1640, and that the castle was already demolished by then, though the bawn remained in use alongside modest domestic structures, all described as inhabited. A bawn, in the Irish context, is a defensive enclosure wall surrounding a tower house or castle, used to protect livestock and provide a defensible yard. The building whose remnants survive today was set into the north-east angle of that bawn, constructed from roughly coursed limestone rubble, and measured approximately 10.9 metres north to south and between five and five and a half metres east to west internally. A neighbouring landowner recalled that it originally stood as high as the bawn wall itself, suggesting it reached two storeys, but it was knocked in the 1960s. The concrete floor immediately south of the structure and the concreted face of the bawn wall are legible traces of that more recent intervention, sitting awkwardly alongside the seventeenth-century masonry they partly obscure.
The site sits on the south-sloping edge of an east to west ridge above the River Suir, with a small lake roughly 150 metres to the south and rocky outcrop to the north. The landscape around it is undulating, and the position of the bawn on the ridge would once have made reasonable sense as a vantage point, even after the castle itself had gone.