Kilgobbin Castle is a 15th-century

tower house A tower house is a particular type of stone structure, built for defensive purposes as well as habitation. Tower houses began to appear in the Middle Ages, especially in mountainous or limited access areas, in order to command and defend strateg ...

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

Location

Kilgobbin Castle is located to the north of Stepaside and east of

Two Rock Two Rock (; archaic: Black Mountain; ' ()) is a mountain in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, Ireland. It is high and is the 382nd highest mountain in Ireland. It is the highest point of the group of hills in the Dublin Mountains which comprises Tw ...

, guarding the southern approach to

from County Wicklow.

History

Archeological excavations have shown that the site of the tower house was inhabited long before it was built; there is evidence of 11th–12th century metalworking, a 13th-century " plough pebble" and 13th–14th century pottery. Kilgobbin Castle was built by the

Cambro-Norman Cambro-Normans ( la, Cambria; "Wales", cy, Normaniaid Cymreig; nrf, Nouormands Galles) were Normans who settled in southern Wales, and the Welsh Marches, after the Norman invasion of Wales, allied with their counterpart families who settled E ...

Walsh family , as one of the Pale towers built after King Henry VI, in 1429, awarded a grant of ten pounds to any man who built a castle on the edge of the Pale; it was one of several on the southern edge of

The Pale The Pale (Irish: ''An Pháil'') or the English Pale (' or ') was the part of Ireland directly under the control of the English government in the Late Middle Ages. It had been reduced by the late 15th century to an area along the east coast st ...

. In 1476 the castle was sacked by the O'Byrnes. In 1641 the Walshes were dispossessed, with the castle going to Adam Loftus, who then rented it to Mathew Talbot, an officer in the Confederate Irish Army, and the castle was an important site in the Irish Confederate Wars of the 1640s, including a skirmish near the castle in January 1642. After that war it was granted to Dr. John Harding of Trinity College, Dublin. In the 19th century it was owned by the Eustaces, the McDonnells and the judge and scholar Richard Nutley. It was occupied by several further owners until falling into ruin by the early 19th century. Antiquarian

John Lee John Lee may refer to: Academia * John Lee (astronomer) (1783–1866), president of the Royal Astronomical Society * John Lee (university principal) (1779–1859), University of Edinburgh principal * John Lee (pathologist) (born 1961), English ...

visited Kilgobbin Castle in 1806–7 and noted it was formerly called Sesson Castle. Local legend claimed Kilgobbin Castle was haunted by a man in a suit of armor and a woman who carried a bucket of water and rattled coins in her apron.

Building

The castellated fortification is a tall square tower. Only two of the walls are still standing, the north and east walls having collapsed in 1832. The entrance is in the west wall. It is three storeys high with thick

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies under ...

walls,

arrow slits An arrowslit (often also referred to as an arrow loop, loophole or loop hole, and sometimes a balistraria) is a narrow vertical aperture in a fortification through which an archer can launch arrows or a crossbowman can launch Crossbow bolt, bolts ...

and a

vaulted In architecture, a vault (French ''voûte'', from Italian ''volta'') is a self-supporting arched form, usually of stone or brick, serving to cover a space with a ceiling or roof. As in building an arch, a temporary support is needed while ring ...

ground floor ceiling. A service tower on the southeast corner contains a

spiral staircase Stairs are a structure designed to bridge a large vertical distance between lower and higher levels by dividing it into smaller vertical distances. This is achieved as a diagonal series of horizontal platforms called steps which enable passage ...

and

garderobe Garderobe is a historic term for a room in a medieval castle. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' gives as its first meaning a store-room for valuables, but also acknowledges "by extension, a private room, a bed-chamber; also a privy". The word der ...

References

Castles in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown Reportedly haunted locations in Ireland Towers completed in the 15th century 1470s establishments in Ireland Archaeological sites in County Dublin {{Ireland-castle-stub