For centuries before structures which we now identify as castles were built, men in Ireland erected enclosures and fortified sites. Some of these were essential components of the early medieval (or ‘early Christian’) society of Ireland from the fifth or sixth centuries onwards. The commonest of these were the ‘normal’ raths, or ringforts, scattered in their thousands across the landscape of the island. These are circular enclosures, up to about 60 metres (200 feet) across, although usually only half that size, defined by a single bank of earth inside a ditch (for a discussion of these and other sites, see Mallory and McNeill, 1990, 184-225). In their lack of defensive equipment, notably their often open entrances and the lack of maintenance of their enclosing banks and ditches, and in their social position associated with the free farming class rather than with aristocrats, these ‘normal’ raths can hardly be considered in the same context as castles.
More complex, because less well understood, are the variety of sites which appear to be more strongly fortified raths. In the sort of buildings found within the enclosure, and the size of the enclosure itself, they resemble raths. Their perimeter, however, is defined not by a bank and ditch, but by elevating the whole area on to a mound. The result gives us sites which appear (without excavation) now to be very similar to the mottes of later castles. Many of these raised raths are marked by ramped entrances which break the perimeter of the raised mound, to provide easier access to the top. Similarly, some sites, such as Gransha, Co. Down (Lynn, 1985), are sited along ridges and the raised appearance is produced only along the greater part of the perimeter: the central part, along the ridge top, is hardly raised at all, and again offers easy access to the ‘mound’ top. At Ballynarry (Davison, 1962) or Rathmullan (Lynn, 1982), both in Co. Down, the raised mounds were produced in small increases in height over a long period of time. At Rathmullan in particular, this is in contrast with the conversion of the site in around 1200 into a motte, when the pre-existing mound was doubled in height in a single effort.
The sites where the raised effect is either not carried around the whole perimeter, or that perimeter is deliberately breached to provide easier access, would seem to be significantly less effective defensively than we would expect from a castle. With the sites which have been developed into mounds by gradually adding to their height, it is true that the same effect has been found in the Rhineland, and there it is associated with the origins of castle building; the type site for this process is the Husterknupp (Herrenbrodt, 1958). It must be pointed out, however, that the Rhenish sites, and those of the Low Countries where we may see the same phenomenon, are sited in low-lying, waterlogged situations, often in preference to drier sites nearby. One could instance here the site of Leichlingen (Muller-Wille, 1966, no. 52) where it is placed in the valley bottom in preference to a steep bluff only a few hundred metres to the southeast; these sites relied on water for their defences, not on the height of their perimeter, as a true motte did. This is not the case in Ireland, where the gradually mounded sites are set, like the ‘normal’ raths, well up slope from ground liable to flood, and so give protection. Defence in Ireland comes from height alone, not from water.
The crux of the matter comes with two sites, Big Glebe in Co. Londonderry (Lynn, 1982, 167) and Deer Park Farms in Co. Antrim (Hamlin and Lynn, 1988, 44-7). At Deer Park Farms, at one point during a long occupation involving several small-scale increases in the height of the site, some 1.5 m (5 ft) of gravel and soil was dumped on the site, partly contained by a redundant house. At Big Glebe the whole mound, some 6 m (20 ft) high, was constructed in a single effort, not gradually in several stages over time. At this site at least, we have something which, if excavation had dated it to around 1200 instead of several centuries before that, we would not hesitate to call a motte. Neither Deer Park Farms nor Big Glebe is mentioned in documentary sources, so that we cannot locate either of them directly in the social or political structure of the time. In some cases, notably at Rathmullan, the raised site (however produced) was in occupation in the twelfth century, and overlapped in time with the construction of castles; indeed the Rathmullan mound was doubled in height then to convert it into a true motte castle. Relationships between the traditional sites and castles are possible, but not proven.
The artificial islands constructed in lakes, known as crannogs, were lived in by kings and aristocrats and are clearly defensive in their siting and purpose. As military structures, they were revived at the end of the middle ages, and proved to be effective strongholds during the Tudor wars in Ireland. Unfortunately, there have been few excavations at crannogs, and there is a real dearth of chronological information about their use as opposed to their construction, where dendrochronology has given us dates which place them clearly in the seventh century or before. Whether any individual crannog was continually used thereafter until the late middle ages, or in the same way, is unclear.
If, however, we take the definition of a castle, published in 1977 (Saunders, 1977, 2), as ‘a fortified residence which might combine administrative and judicial functions, but in which military considerations were paramount’, then crannogs pose a real problem for the students of castles. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that crannogs may meet this definition as well as many castles. On the other, they are not generally accepted as castles, usually, if silently, because of two lines of argument. The first is because of the link which is always at the heart of the question of castle origins and definition: in no way were crannogs linked to the territorial estates and system of lordship called feudalism. The problem is that, while this link can be maintained (if only with difficulty) in France or England, if we move to the Gaelic worlds of medieval Scotland or Wales, there we find structures which can only be called castles, and yet which were built and used by lords whose power was not feudal. We shall see the same in Ireland later: the feudal link is not universal. The second argument against the crannog as castle is even cruder, if more powerful. It is that they are found far earlier than any castle, and they do not look anything like what we think of as a castle; this is, of course, a classic circular argument.
That the arguments are weak does not alter the probability that they are right: crannogs were not castles. The problem is not with the crannogs but with our attempts to produce a simple definition for such a protean thing as the castle. There are two problems here. The first is that the link to feudalism is real but not absolute: it was clearly possible for the structure to be used without the institutions which brought it forth. When castles were used in societies which we consider as non feudal, we must ask questions as to the nature of the power structure involved, and whether the lord was borrowing more than the physical castle. A Gaelic lord might build a castle to live in, in imitation of feudal lords elsewhere, but the key word is imitation; this would have nothing to do with the origin of castles, or even with their early use, except in the Gaelic world concerned. The second general problem is that of extrapolating from the form of the site to the function, particularly relevant to the raised rath sites. They are too simple to make conclusions about the institutions which accompanied them. Just because a circular, enclosed site develops into a mound over time, this is not sufficiently peculiar to demand that we attribute the development to importing ideas from a world of castles. This can go further, for the builder of a castle might not use it in the way it was intended; castles of the nineteenth century were not built by feudal magnates, but they have the form of those that were.
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