Building, Graystown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Utility Structures

Building, Graystown, Co. Tipperary

A low rise of rock breaks the grassland two fields north of Graystown Castle in County Tipperary, and what sits on top of it is easy to miss entirely.

The remains of a rectangular tower, its walls reduced to grass-covered footings no more than a metre and a half high, occupy a modest outcrop that nonetheless commands clear views in every direction. Attached to its northern and eastern angles is a bawn, the term for a fortified enclosure, typically of stone, that would have surrounded and protected a tower house or similar stronghold. Further wall-footings nearby suggest additional buildings clustered around the structure, and a deserted medieval settlement lies in the field immediately to the south, adding another layer of abandonment to the landscape.

The tower itself measures roughly 7.7 metres by 6.5 metres externally, and the walls, where they survive, are approximately a metre thick. What makes the site historically curious is its silence in the documentary record: it does not appear in the Civil Survey, nor is it depicted on the Down Survey maps of 1665 to 1666. According to research by Clutterbuck in 2000, this absence strongly suggests the complex post-dates the middle of the seventeenth century, meaning it was built after those surveys were completed. The implication is significant. If the tower house it replaced had already been abandoned by that point, the settlement visible here may represent a late seventeenth-century reoccupation of the site, possibly by Cromwellian settlers who were granted lands across Tipperary following the upheavals of the 1650s. The small cluster of buildings, the bawn, the carefully chosen outcrop, all of it may be the trace of a planted community that itself did not last long enough to leave much of a mark on the written record.

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Pete F
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