Settlement cluster, Court (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Settlement Sites

Settlement cluster, Court (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

On the south bank of the River Maigue in County Limerick, the ground holds the memory of a small settlement that has almost entirely dissolved back into the earth.

What was once a tower house, a bawn, a cluster of dwellings, and a north-south roadway is now a scatter of rubble, low earthen banks, and a faint trace of gravel floor that only archaeology has been able to read. The castle it belonged to, known variously as Cullam or Killacollum Castle, sits on a hill in the Court townland near Kildimo; the settlement associated with it lies just to the west, its outlines still faintly legible in aerial photographs but almost invisible at ground level.

The written record picks up the site in the mid-seventeenth century, already in decline. The 1654 to 1656 Civil Survey of Limerick recorded John Haly, late of Limerick, as proprietor of lands in Killa Collum, describing the property as containing a ruinous castle and three small cottages. Just a few years later, the 1657 Down Survey map of Kenry Barony depicted a tower house with an angle tower standing alongside a cluster of dwellings, suggesting that the settlement, while reduced, had not yet fully vanished. Writing in 1896, Dowd noted that the lower reaches of the Maigue had once been guarded by Cullam Castle on its hill and by a low square tower at Court closer to the river's edge, framing the site as part of a deliberate defensive arrangement along the waterway. Begley, writing in 1906, added that an old church must once have stood nearby. The archaeological testing carried out in 2005 by Frank Coyne of Aegis Archaeology Ltd filled in further detail: a portion of the northern wall of the tower house survived to a height of 2.4 metres and roughly six metres in length, and the original sandy-gravel floor was identified inside. Around the tower house, low gravel and stone banks defined a bawn, the enclosed courtyard typical of Irish tower houses, with a possible entrance to the north. Animal bone and pottery sherds recovered from all eight test trenches pointed to occupation running from the sixteenth century into the mid-seventeenth.

The site sits in farmland near Kildimo and is not formally presented for visitors. The earthworks associated with the deserted settlement are most clearly seen in aerial imagery rather than on foot, where low banks can be easy to miss against ordinary field ground. The rubble pile of the castle is the most visible feature on site, though the one surviving stretch of wall, just over two metres high and breached at its centre, gives some sense of the original structure's scale. The pottery and bone recovered during excavation are the kind of finds that rarely make headlines but quietly confirm that ordinary life, not just military or elite occupation, was once organised around this now-silent hilltop above the Maigue.

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