site of Fort and Castle, Fortchester, Co. Wexford

The label reads: site of fort and castle. Today there is nothing to see at ground level, no earthwork, no masonry, no rise in the field. The place exists now almost entirely on paper.

The name Fortchester gives the game away. The fort was built in 1610, a bastioned fort being a fortification designed with angular projecting points to allow defenders to cover the full perimeter with flanking fire, a style common to early seventeenth-century colonial plantation. Its first commander was Captain Denis Dale, with a garrison of just six men, and it was named in honour of Sir Arthur Chichester, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, one of the principal architects of the Ulster Plantation. The fort's history was brief and violent. In 1641, during the rebellion that swept across Ireland that year, it was captured. By the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed Cromwellian-era land record, it appears simply as a ruined fort, listed among the property of one William Doyle. The survey offers no further description, suggesting there was already little left worth describing.