DISTRIBUTION

O’Danachair put the castles listed by Leask on to a map of Ireland: whether he took out the sites which are not tower-houses is not stated (O’Danachair, 1979), and this remains the best indication of their distribution which we have. With due regard for its inaccuracy, it can be seen from it that the greatest number of towerhouses lie in the south and west of the island and the Midlands; the extreme south-west, however, has relatively fewer. Apart from the south of Wexford, where there are many, the east coast in general shows only a moderate density. The northern third has the sparsest distribution, except for a considerable number in the south-east of Co. Down and a number in north Donegal. The areas with a high density of tower-houses are those where the fourteenth century saw the greatest instability and change in land ownership. Where the three great fourteenthcentury Earls carved out their lordships, Desmond, Ormonde and Kildare, are many tower-houses. Similarly, those parts where new lords succeeded the thirteenth-century order, as with the Burkes of Connacht or the English remnant of the Earldom of Ulster, occupied by the savages moving from the north, are areas of dense tower-house building.

This is parallel to the distribution of tower-houses outside Ireland. In Britain, they are most common along the Anglo-Scottish border as it emerged after the wars of Scottish independence. In France the idea of the small, strong tower is found in Normandy and the south-west, areas of fighting in the Hundred Years’ War. What all areas have in common is the breakdown of central authority as it had been constituted before 1350. They are areas which were often seen by royal clerks as being lawless and violent; as with Ireland, this may not have been objectively true for it equated central government with law and order. In this light, the idea of the tower-houses being popular in Ireland is easily explained, and indeed this gives them their interest outside the country. As with the larger enclosure castles, the tower-houses of Ireland shed light on the question of the alleged breakdown of life in later medieval Ireland.