It is one of the oddities of the subject that the question of whether the Irish constructed castles before 1350 has been very little discussed. Intuitively we would expect them to do so. In Wales, faced by determined assaults by the English barons, the native lords did so to protect their lands. In Gaelic Scotland, without the same pressing need to resist conquest, the lords also built castles during the thirteenth century. By 1250 it would have been quite difficult for an Irish lord to have found a lord outside Ireland who neither occupied a castle himself nor had a neighbour who did. Orpen was not inclined to address the question: the main thrust of his work on castles was to show that mottes were not early Irish mounds, while his historical work was aimed at recounting the actions of the English lords, with whom he identified unashamedly. On the other side, there has been perhaps a curious idea that it would somehow have contaminated the Irish if they were to indulge in such an English activity as building castles. This not only demeans the intelligence of Irish lords—if castles were effective tools for their lordship, only a fool and a bigot would eschew them—but prevents us from examining a potential source of information about the nature of Irish lordship under the impact of the new ideas from England. We have seen something of these issues in considering the possibility of Irish lords constructing castles before 1169.
One of the difficulties with trying to grapple with the problem is that of agreeing how we might recognise an Irish castle. To be identified at all as a castle the site must obviously be different from earlier Irish ones. If it is, and thus relates to English castles, how are we to tell if it was Irish-owned or built? There are no contemporary surveys of Irish lands or estates, which would name castles for us, while the Annals name few places; arguing from such silence is clearly no good. It usually comes down to making a statement as to where the boundaries of English and Irish lordships lay, and then arguing that sites within the Irish lands were Irish.
It is easy to illustrate the snares in this argument. The motte at Clones was built on land which any map of medieval Ireland, except one for the year 1212, would identify as Irish: it was built as part of an unsuccessful attempt to expand the borders of English lordship. In the 1211-12 Pipe Roll, the castles of Dromore (Fig. 42) and Moycove in Ulster are recorded as being supplied and repaired by the Justiciar; they were clearly English castles but they lie in land which was then the small Irish kingdom of Iveagh. We assume that they were outposts built by the English, but they could have been Irish castles captured in that year: there was war between the English and Iveagh then. A further dimension to the problem comes with other mottes in the same county, especially Duneight or Crown Mound, near Newry. They might be similar English outposts which just happen not to have generated expenses accounted for in the Pipe Roll. On the other hand, Duneight was built on the site of an earlier fort and township of the Dal Fiatach (see chapter 1) and that part of the county (ecclesiastically the deanery of Dalboyn) may have been reserved for the Mac Dunleavy kings who continued in the area as ‘Kings of the Irish of Ulster’ under the English earls. Crown Mound lies close to the Cistercian abbey, and possibly the town, of Newry; if the Magennis kings of Iveagh had a fixed, fortified centre, Crown Mound would be a likely candidate. Outpost or Irish castle, simply arguing from location will not decide the question in any individual case.
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