The efforts of the Justiciars under King John had left the area where Munster, Leinster and Connacht met, along the middle Shannon eastwards to Co. Laois, still lying between securely organised lordships. Here the Crown made a real effort to assert detailed control on the ground, through the construction of castles. Whether this was because of a real grasp of the strategy of Ireland or simply because it was a vacuum between the English lordships which inherited Irish boundaries is not the point here. The effort started with the English-style castle of Limerick in the 1210s; to the north it culminated in Roscommon in the 1280s. Geographically, chronologically and in the scale of building, however, there were other royal castles in between.
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Figure 76 Rinndown castle: general view
Although it is now overgrown, substantial remains survive at the castle of Rinndown to the north of Athlone, sited towards the end of a peninsula jutting out from its western shore into Lough Ree (Fig. 76). Work on it was started in 1227, and masonry work on it was suspended so that the money could be diverted to building a bridge at Athlone (GDI, I, 2043). The castle is very simple in plan (Fig. 77). A ditch cuts off part of the peninsula, where it is naturally narrow; within this is an oval enclosure surrounded by a simple curtain wall, without mural towers and with only a single, and very simple, gate tower, containing just the gate and a portcullis (Fig. 78). A later building projects to the south. The castle is dominated by a first-floor hall, built beside the entrance; the ground floor is vaulted and there were two good windows facing north over the ditch and a door communicated with the gate tower.
The remarkable document describing the construction of a motte and bailey at Roscrea in north Tipperary has already beeen referred to. Between 1278 and 1285, ?875, along with unspecified sums, were accounted for to pay for works at Roscrea, under the direction of John de Lydyard (GDI, II, 1570; III, 169; 36th RDKPRI, 40, 41, 44, 47, 59). To this we may attribute the core of the present structure (Stout, 1984, 116-17), an irregular oval courtyard, some 40 m (130 ft) across, enclosed by a wall and ditch (Fig. 79). Along the curtain are three towers: a gate tower to the north and two to the south. The south-western tower is curious in that it flanks the western curtain but not the southern one. Within it there is a first-floor chamber with a fireplace, itself later, but probably replacing an earlier one. The south-eastern tower is larger and provided rooms on three levels. The gate tower is a single rectangular block, divided into gate passage and flanking rooms at ground level. Although recent excavation has shown that the gate was defended by a turning bridge over the ditch, the tower projects very little from the line of the curtain. It belongs with the single gate tower as seen at Carlingford or Dunamase just after 1200, rather than with the gate house with twin projecting towers of the normal later thirteenth-century type. At both first and second floors (the latter showing signs of considerable later adaptations) were two fine rooms, occupying the whole area of the tower.
From the beginning of the thirteenth century, there was a royal castle and manor at Newcastle McKynegan (Orpen, 1908, 129). During the 1270s trouble broke out between the Irish of the Wicklow hills and the English Crown, which was to continue to the end of the sixteenth century. The trouble took the form of Irish raids on the lowland settlements, followed by counter-raids by the English up into the hills. For the latter, the Crown needed bases, the chief one of which on the eastern side of the hills seems to have been Newcastle. It was not chosen for its particular suitability, but because it was already a royal manor: it has good views to the east over the coastal lands, but not to the west from where danger threa tened. The site consists of a broad, low earthwork platform about 40 m (130 ft) across, at the end of a ridge. At the same time as the work was proceeding at Roscrea, between 1274 and 1295, ?284 were accounted for works at Newcastle McKynegan (GDI, II, 309-10, 317, 440-1; 36th RDKPRI, 35, 44, 53, 59, 61, 68; 38th RDKPRI, 47). It is worth comparing this with the ?3,500 spent on Roscommon or the ?875 on Roscrea: Newcastle was not high on the royal agenda. The documents record the existence of an enclosing wall, a hall and a tower. The tower was probably the lower parts of the present standing building, which was rebuilt from first-floor level upwards, and substantially at ground-floor level as well, during the sixteenth century (figs. 80, 81). Originally, however, it was a gate house with twin D-shaped towers projecting well beyond the line of the curtain wall.
To these three castles we may add two others. An early key to the area of the middle Shannon was the castle of Athlone (Fig. 82). Here there was a motte and bailey of around 1210; the motte was later encased in a polygonal tower which still survives, much rebuilt, at the core of the castle, itself now largely shaped by its use as a barrack in the nineteenth century. Along the frontage of the Shannon are the bases of two round angle towers, which are the only remnants of the later thirteenth-century work at the castle (see Fig. 81). South of Athlone lies Clonmacnoise, where John de Gray, the Justiciar, also erected an earthwork castle in 1213 (see Fig. 43). The remains now consist of three parts: the ditch and earth bank; a rectangular curtain wall set within the eastern half of the earthwork; and a hall set on a raised area against the east curtain wall. Although
Figure 77 Rinndown castle: general plan and plans of the hall and gate
It has been described as a ringwork (Barry, 1983, 301), the raised area is almost certainly the remains of a partially levelled motte. The stone castle, which was royal at least as late as the 1230s, consists of a courtyard about 16m (50 ft) square internally, with the gate set in a single tower at the south-west corner. This was entered, at firstfloor level, through a later stone forework, containing latrines serving first and second floors; a circular stair in the south-west corner led down to the ground floor and up to the second (Fig. 83).
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