A parallel case to that of Crown Mound is found to the north-west, at Managh Beg in Co. Londonderry. This is a very large motte, although constructed rather by reshaping a gravel spur than by heaping up much earth. It lies on the right bank of the Faughan river about two miles upstream from Lough Enagh, where there was a crannog, and has been identified as the ‘town of O’Cahan’ visited by Archbishop Colton in 1397 (Reeves, 1850, 28-9). It seems very far from the land held by the English in Ulster before the middle of the thirteenth century, and the general association with O’Cahan power might support the case for it being an Irish motte.
The case for the systematic use of castles by Irish in Ulster is best made with the small kingdom of Ui Tuirtre, ruled by the O’Flynn family. It occupied central Co. Antrim from the Clough Water river to the north almost to the town of Antrim in the south. Within this area are a number of mottes, including such fine examples as Harryville in the modern outskirts of Ballymena town (see Fig. 44). On the northern border of Ui Tuirtre, on a spur overlooking the Clough Water, lies the fort of Doonbought (McNeill, 1977). It saw the construction, in its second phase, of a small polygonal enclosure castle of the English border type discussed in the last chapter. In the first phase it had three parts: an inner enclosure and two outer areas. The inner enclosure was set on the rocky crest of the spur defined by a dry-stone wall, while the northern line of approach was cut off by a ditch and bank, retained in the front by another dry-stone wall. In its plan it is a motte with two baileys, but the use of dry-stone walling does not look like the work of English castle builders. The date of the artefacts in the soil dumped directly on top of the first-phase levels was clearly of the thirteenth
Century. It is difficult to see this as being other than a fort or castle of the Irish of that date.
In 1259-60 O’Flynn, king of Ui Tuirtre, signed a general letter about an agreement he had made with Hugh Byset and the Earl of Ulster ‘apud Conoriam’, i. e. at Connor, Co. Antrim, in the centre of his kingdom (McNeill, 1980, 102-3). This was the traditional seat of the bishop, but it also has preserved the remains of a stone castle. These are not very impressive, consisting of a basically pentagonal curtain wall mostly reduced to a little above ground level, and with a ditch outside it (Fig. 101). There are no signs of towers along it, or any elaboration for an entrance, which may have been at the southern angle: the only feature it has is a base batter and the stub of a wall at the south-west. This has a good claim to be the site where O’Flynn lived and where he signed documents issued in his name. The survival of the kingdom of Ui Tuirtre does need explanation, for it was surrounded on three sides by the Earldom of Ulster during the thirteenth century when the Earldom was expanding. The land of mid-Antrim is good for agriculture and it would seem an obvious target for the English, yet it survived until the collapse of the Earldom in the fourteenth century. One of the reasons for its success may have been because the O’Flynns deployed castles: mottes, a border fort and a stone castle for themselves, the whole acting as a deterrent to English land hunger.
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