Golden, Baurstookeen, Co. Tipperary

What makes it unusual is the sheer density of history compressed beneath and around it, much of it invisible to the casual eye. A tower house guards what is now a fifteenth or sixteenth-century bridge, a medieval church has left no trace above ground, and the ground itself, when archaeologists have opened it up, keeps producing evidence of occupation stretching back well before any written record of the place.

Golden's strategic importance in the medieval period came down to a simple geographical fact: it controlled one of the significant crossing points on the River Suir. Whoever held that crossing held a considerable advantage, and the combination of bridge and tower house, a fortified residential structure of the kind common across late medieval Ireland, reflects precisely that logic. Excavations on the eastern bank of the river revealed a thirteenth or fourteenth-century building roughly a hundred metres from the tower house, and further work near the old fair green uncovered occupation of the same period. Even older activity came to light when a seventeenth-century building at the eastern end of the bridge was excavated; beneath it lay evidence of ironworking associated with pottery suggesting a date before the thirteenth century. The medieval church known as Relickmurry, which appears to have stood on the northern side of the village within what is now a Church of Ireland graveyard, has vanished entirely above ground, though medieval architectural fragments have been recovered from the graveyard. By the mid-seventeenth century the Civil Survey recorded James, Earl of Ormond, as proprietor of 'Goulden', noting a castle, a bridge on a pass, and some thatched houses, a description that matches closely what the Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656 also depicts.

The graveyard where Relickmurry once stood is worth a careful look for anyone passing through, since the recovered architectural fragments suggest something of the earlier structure survives in fragmentary form even if the building itself does not. The bridge and tower house together give a tangible sense of why this particular bend in the Suir mattered so much to the people who fought over it.