From Strongbow’s death in 1176 to William Marshal’s coming to Ireland after 1200, Leinster was without a resident lord. This left Meath as the greatest Irish lordship, under Hugh de Lacy and his son. In 1174 there was a castle at Trim, attacked and destroyed during Ruadhri Ua Conchabair’s raid into Meath. It was rebuilt in stone, as the caput of the lordship, and the largest of Irish castles. Its site is undistinguished by nature, set on the south bank of the River Boyne, but its size and grandeur alone mark it out as the caput of the lordship of Meath (Fig. 6). Ireland’s largest castle, its remains consist of the great tower, roughly in the middle of the enclosure; along the river front and towards the town, the curtain has rectangular towers, but towards the south, facing the open country and the approach from Dublin, it has half-round ones (Fig. 7). We are not yet in a position to give a detailed description of this castle, because it is the subject of a major campaign of conservation and analysis of the standing fabric, and excavation of the belowground remains. These studies, when they are complete and published, will greatly amplify our existing knowledge, expressed in the publication of the excavations of 1971-4 (Sweetman, 1978) and an article on the basic outline of the structure and history (McNeill, 1990a).
The great tower still dominates both castle and town by its height and unique design: a central block, to which were attached side towers (Fig. 8). It was built in several stages, the first being the central block to first-floor level, but with the walls carried up a floor higher, to support the side towers which rose to that level. This extraordinary structure was roofed, and recent examination of the fabric has shown that it had a wall-walk and parapet on top of the walls of the central block. Later the whole was raised a height of three floors (entry, second and third) in the central block, which also received a north-south dividing wall of stone internally, and four floors (including the ground floor or basement) for the side towers. Its height was then further increased, incorporating the earlier wall-walk into a gallery level above the main third floor (O’Brien, personal communication). Until recently, dating of the great tower at Trim was forced to rely on the traditional mixture of scant documentary references, masonry styles or parallels and the general historical context. The position is now greatly clarified by the discovery of oak beams built into the fabric during construction, which have been dated by dendrochronology. When the detailed sequence of phasing of the tower’s construction is worked out and aligned with these dates, we will know to within a few years the chronology of its several parts, a remarkable precision for a castle of around 1200, and a unique insight into the processes and changes of planning which went on.
This great tower was weakly defended. Its entrance was a single door at firstfloor level in the north wall of the east side tower, only partially guarded by a timber gallery (and that may be later) around the exterior north-east angle of the central block. The excavations have shown how this weakness was both recognised in the later thirteenth century and corrected by building a towered screen wall in front of the entrance, to protect it. The loops in the ground floors of the side towers gave no flanking fire, but with their wide embrasures in walls already thin enough, provided obvious points for attack. The side towers were floored with timber (except for the northern one): if an attacker did get in, he would have found access to the rest of the great tower easy.
Display and the provision of rooms were clearly the priority of the design of the completed tower. The varied spaces provided by the plan were used to give a range of different rooms in a number of suites. The entry floor was carefully organised, with a pivotal entry room giving access to the main stair and rooms in the northern and southern side towers. A suite of two rooms occupied the western half, guarding the way from the entry to a stair in the south-west angle of the central block, which led to the second-floor suite and to the great room on the third floor. On the second floor was a suite of rooms, carefully insulated from the main stair in the north-east angle of the main block. The main room was the one which took up the whole of the third floor of the central block, linked to a gallery along what had been the parapet of the first phase. It was clearly the key room, but it is too far from the entrance to be a hall; we should see it as de Lacy’s great chamber, not his public hall.
It has always been assumed that the great tower is the earliest stonework surviving at Trim. Its military weakness on the one hand, and the fact that it appears not to provide a great hall among its many rooms on the other, lead us to conclude that the curtain walls, and buildings against them, cannot be much later. In particular, the castle needed a great hall for public life. Its position must be marked by the large windows which can be seen along the Boyne frontage in the northern curtain wall. They have been blocked up later, for they must have been a source of real military weakness along that front. The ground within the courtyard of the castle here is clearly higher than when the castle was in use; a vault below the line of the windows marks the ground level; the great hall was on the first floor.
Figure 6 Trim castle: general view from across the River Boyne
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