Stell (1981, 23-4; 1985, 203) has rightly warned against too casual an assumption either that hall-houses are a separate group of buildings in their own right or that they need to be dated to before 1350. Nevertheless, it is worth trying to isolate such structures in Ireland, because they may answer part of the question concerning the lowest end of castle building, and because their relationship to the later tower-houses needs to be examined. The first feature that we would be looking for is that they should be clearly rectangular, for, although ‘the distinction between a hall and a tower is a fine matter of degree, if not wholly imperceptible’ (Stell, 1985, 203), it is a distinction which we must explore (Fig. 95). We may pick out a number of buildings and present some of their characteristics to test the possibility of there being such a thing in Ireland as the hall-house, and then to suggest its date range and use. In Table 2, the first eight buildings are reasonable candidates for thirteenth-century hall-houses. Ballisnihiney, Delvin and Dunmoe have features which might lead us to consider them as later, while Clough and Lismahon are included as excavated examples of thirteenth-century halls.
The table of details of candidates for inclusion as hall-houses, and others for comparison, includes 11 buildings whose interior dimensions may be obtained: they all approach proportions of 2:1 of length to breadth (Fig. 95). The first nine buildings all have first-floor doorways, marked by the presence on the outside of two large beam holes below the door jambs, to support a timber platform reached by an external timber stair (Fig. 96). This links with two other features. The first is that the windows of the first floor are always clearly larger, in height and in breadth, than those of the ground floor. None of the buildings have a stone division of the first floor: although a timber division might have existed and left no trace of its fixing, it does seem as though we are dealing with a single room, a hall. If we compare the buildings with later tower-houses, we can note that there is a contrast between them and the towers, which have lesser rooms on most floors. Similarly, most tower-houses have spiral stairs, but only Moylough among the candidates for hall-houses has a stair which is not straight: it makes a half-turn before carrying on straight.
Surviving window of the principal floor at Dunmoe has double lights surmounted by a square hood mould, which must be late in date. This contrasts with the others in the table, where late details, such as loops finely carved from limestone or box machicolations, which are so typical of tower-houses in Ireland, are noticeably absent.
Finally, we should note that none of these buildings shows signs of being originally set within an enclosure, which distinguishes them from some of the lesser castles discussed in the last chapter. Moylough is also set on an inland promontory, cut off by a ditch, but here there is no room for subsidiary buildings apart from the stone hall (Fig. 98). As with a hall such as that at Lismahon, set on
Figure 96 Ballisnihiney castle: first-floor door from the outside
A motte without an accompanying bailey, if there were subsidiary buildings, either chambers or farm buildings, they do not seem to have been much valued if they were built outside the ditch. They are noticeably smaller than the halls listed in the last chapter, as well as having no indications of subsidiary rooms. It is therefore possible to distinguish the first eight buildings of Table 2 above as a group, on physical criteria, and to identify them as being what are described elsewhere (Cruden, 1960, 91-9) as hall-houses, probably dating from before 1350.
It is notable that these hall-houses are also set apart in terms of their distribution, socially and geographically. Socially, half of them cannot be
Figure 97 Ballisnihiney castle: the remains of the vault over the first floor
Associated with any documentation. Ballynacourty Court was on one of the demesne manors of the de Burgh lords of Connacht, but not one where they are recorded as having a castle. Shrule was one of the manors granted by Richard de Burgh to his son John in 1308 (Orpen, Normans, III, 208); again, it was not apparently a place where the de Burghs lived. Kilmacduagh lies within the cathedral precinct, and presumably was built by an official of the Church, possibly the Bishop. It was a small diocese, whose bishops were normally Irish, which covered the south-western parts of the de Burgh lordship, occupied through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the O’Heynes and O’Shaughnessies. Moylough may be associated with the grant of the land to Robert de Coterel (Holland, 1988, 77). These stand in contrast to the halls set in enclosures, which were discussed in the last chapter, such as Grenan or Castle Mora, which can be associated with the lesser baronage: these are apparently one step down from that.
They are, however, clearly residential in nature. Their main purpose is to provide a well-built and impressive hall. Defence seems to have been of limited importance, confined to placing the door at the first floor, possibly up a stair which could be removed if necessary. Seven of the eight are to be found in north Co. Galway, indeed (apart from Kilmacduagh) within a tract of land less than 20 miles square (Fig. 99). This immediately raises the suspicion that this is a product of the academic work done, in this case the field survey of Holland in
Figure 98 Moylough castle: general view of the hall-house with ditch close to it
That county. However, it is odd that no other examples, apart from Castle Carra in Antrim, have come to light: we might expect Holland’s work to have produced a preponderance of sites in his area, but not so exclusively. These look like being associated with the de Burgh lordship of Connacht. It is worth remembering the relative absence of mottes in Connacht. The land with the small hall-houses is an area where the drift deposits over the limestone are thin: digging earthworks may have been harder than building in rubble, with stone and lime locally plentiful.
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