BALLYMOON

Figure 66 Ballymoon castle: general plans

And elaborate planning. On the other hand, the other striking thing about Ballymoon is its lack of defences. The gate to the settlement was left uncovered after work had proceeded a long way, and was only to be a single tower at best. The projecting towers provide few flanking loops at the existing levels, and corner towers are conspicuously absent: this is a building purely for domestic use. The later we date it, the more this becomes a problem, for Co. Carlow during the four-teenth and fifteenth century was the scene of many raids from the Irish in the Wicklow hills to the east. It would help if there were any documentary references to it, but there appear to be none, unless under some other name. It presumably lay within the lands of Dunleckny, held in 1247 with St Mullins by the Carews for the service of five knights (Brooks, 1950, 60): this was one of the largest honorial baronies of Leinster, and remained in the hands of the Carews, along with their lands in south Wales, down to the sixteenth century.

It is instructive to compare Ballymoon with the castle of Bodiam in Sussex, the work of an ambitious knight with the backing of the royal court. Both are built as formal squares although Ballymoon provides fewer suites, largely because it lacks the gate house and large towers at the angles of Bodiam. The lord at Bodiam had a larger suite of rooms, and the chapel is also prominent. The ideas and the standards which we may imagine at Ballymoon (Fig. 67) are not far behind those of Bodiam in domestic comfort and display; they differ in quantity rather than in quality. Bodiam has been criticised as a castle for being less than adequate defensively, largely because of the size of some of the windows in the curtain walls, where the desire to light principal rooms takes precedence over defence. Its gate house, corner towers and wide moat, however, make it look formidable compared to Ballymoon.

Close to Ballymoon lies the equally undocumented castle of Ballyloughan, which also presumably lay within the Carew manor of Dunleckny. It is less well preserved than Ballymoon, but enough survives to show that its basic plan was a courtyard some 45 m (150 ft) square (Fig. 68). At the north-east and south-west corners there are now square towers; presumably there was one at each corner. Midway along the south curtain was a small double-towered gate house. The better preserved south-west tower has a good chamber on the first floor, reached directly from the courtyard and equipped with windows with seats (the one facing south has twin lights), a fireplace and a latrine. The gate house has been much rebuilt and it is difficult to analyse its original form. From the scar on the gate house and that on the south-western tower it can be seen that the curtain wall was quite low, only reaching to the first-floor levels of the two buildings; it is also only a little under 2 m (6 ft 6 in) wide. Excavation in 1955 around the north-eastern tower showed that the ditch outside the castle was under 3 m (10 ft) wide and only a little over 1 m (3 ft 4 in) deep (De Paor, 1962, 7). Combined with the two-light window in the south-western tower, which faces out to the field of the castle, it is clear that defence was not a high priority at Ballyloughan any more than at Ballymoon.

Figure 67 Ballymoon castle: reconstructed plan of the first floor

There are no clear parallels for Ballyloughan: the gate house in particular is very small. However, the excavation did find that material dated broadly to the four teenth century had accumulated against the curtain wall by the north-west tower (De Paor, 1962, 8). If we can take this as an indication, and the distinction between fourteenth - and fifteenth-century material in Ireland is still not well understood, then the general idea may be related to the north of England. In Northumbria, the castles of Etal and Ford both have quadrangular courtyards with square corner towers: as with Ballyloughan, these towers are self-sufficient chamber towers.

We can point to other examples of fragments of what became the standard domestic planning of the thirteenth century and later in England, of hall, twin service rooms (buttery and pantry) and chambers at the upper end, which were built in the period in Ireland. A new hall, on the ground floor and equipped with the twin service rooms which were made standard in the thirteenth century, can

Figure 68 Ballyloughan castle: general plan, and plans of the south-west tower and gate house

Be seen at Adare (see Fig. 23), where it replaced the first-floor hall put up when the castle was first built. Other ground-floor halls exist from the period. At Askeaton the fifteenth-century first-floor hall was built over an earlier one, which had a cross building attached, probably a classic example of Faulkner’s end-hall type, where the cross building provides a great chamber (see Fig. 109). At Newcastle West, there may have been another ground-floor hall, marked out by large windows equipped with good tracery, incorporating the curved triangles of early fourteenthcentury English style; it may have been a chapel, but the style in either case is purely English Decorated (see Fig. 107).

Wherever we are led to make direct comparisons with England, this is the message from the castles of the period. We may imagine Gilbert de Clare coming from his castle of Caerphilly, built by his father to assert his power in a lordship threatened by the Welsh king, Llewellyn, to visit his father-in-law, Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, in one of his three new castles. Gilbert would have smiled at the defences, lacking any concept of concentricity, and in particular at Ballymote, which did have a plan with angle towers and a gate house, but which seems to have lacked a true moat. On the other hand, he must have been impressed with the ambition of Greencastle, Donegal: even if it was small in comparison with Edward I’s castles, from which it drew its ideas, it provided the lord and his principal guest with accommodation of the highest standard. Had the Earl of Chester seen the changes that Rohesia de Verdon made to the plan of his castle of Beeston, when she built at Castle Roche, he must have acknowledged that she made it a much better castle to live in, if harder to defend.

It remains to define what such parallels may tell us of the men who built these castles: how did the ideas spread between England and Ireland in the period? In the case of Greencastle, Donegal, we can see the interest of the patron: Richard de Burgh was close to Edward I, and was himself knighted by the king at Rhuddlan castle. The architectural references, especially the external appearance derived from Caernarvon, must represent a deliberate choice by Richard, associating himself with the crowning castle of Edward’s conquest, itself recalling the walls of Theodosius in Constantinople in just those ways: polygonal towers and two colours of stone. We may attribute to him the overall plan and the use of polygonal towers, with two colours of stone, because it would have been he who made the decisions about the political message contained in these architectural statements. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that he would have been concerned about the details of the internal arrangements, with their parallels in Harlech, and we may suspect that here we have a case of a mason directly recruited from the royal works in Wales to build Greencastle, at a time when the Welsh works were winding down. Similarly, the de Verdon lands in England were centred on Alton in Staffordshire: to reach them from Co. Louth, a traveller was almost bound to go through Chester, and near Beeston, so that the patron is likely to have been the direct means of transmitting the ideas or else recruiting a mason.

Little of the rest of the story of English ideas is so specific; it is more a matter of being in tune with the general run of ideas current at the time, whether of gate houses or the development of chamber suites. It is interesting to contrast this general awareness of style with times when we attribute awareness of style in a particular case to the arrival in Ireland of a particular mason or the experience of an individual patron. It shows that for these ideas to travel between the two countries, it is not necessary to invoke a specific incident. They were part of the general stock of ideas around at the time, on both sides of the Irish Sea. Patrons knew about them and masons understood how to translate them into buildings, if they were commissioned to do so. If they did not draw on this stock, that would not have been because of ignorance or incompetence, but through a deliberate choice to build something different.