Town defences, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Town Defenses
Of the five gates that once pierced the medieval town wall of Kilmallock, four have vanished entirely.
The fifth, Blossom's Gate, still spans a road on the west side of town, its round arch funnelling traffic much as it did when the wall around it was new. That the gate survives at all is quietly remarkable; that roughly 575 metres of the wall itself also survives along the western circuit, rising in places to five metres, makes Kilmallock one of the more substantially preserved walled towns in Munster, though it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Fethard or Youghal.
The paper trail for these defences begins in the 1280s, when a deed noted the "communal fosse", a defensive ditch, as a boundary marker. Murage, a toll levied specifically to fund the building and repair of town walls, was already being collected before 1300; a pipe roll of 1301 to 1302 records that Kilmallock owed a £14 fine in connection with such a grant. In 1375 the town received a formal right to collect murage for ten years in order to enclose the town with stone, and a further grant followed in 1409. Despite this documentary reach back into the thirteenth century, the surviving masonry shows no clear signs of that early phase and appears to belong largely to the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The wall is built with a rubble core and external limestone facings, averaging between 1.45 and 1.5 metres thick. In places the internal facing has been stripped away, leaving the rubble core exposed to the weather, and there is a recognised risk of collapse in those sections. Beyond the wall itself, a second structure complicates the picture: King's Castle, which spans St John's Street on a pointed arch and appears to have begun as a gatehouse before being repurposed as a royal castle. It is shown on an Elizabethan map of around 1600 labelled "Queen's Castle" and was partly destroyed in 1690 to 1691.
Blossom's Gate is the most legible point of entry into the site. It is a three-floored limestone tower with long-and-short quoins, a round arch wide enough for a single lane of traffic, and one surviving flanking tower, rounded on the outside. A pointed doorway on the north-west side leads to an internal stair lit by narrow flat-lintelled windows. The wall running north from the gate towards the rear of SS Peter and Paul's Church is the best-preserved stretch, and behind the church it is also worth looking for traces of a seventeenth-century earthen bastion. The eastern side of the medieval circuit was partly defined by the River Loobagh rather than by masonry, and the southern wall survives only in a short, difficult-to-spot fragment. The Elizabethan map, held at Trinity College Dublin as MS 1209/62, is a useful reference if you want to trace the full original circuit before walking it.
