A bawn is the defensive wall surrounding an Irish

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 ...

. It is the

anglicised Anglicisation is the process by which a place or person becomes influenced by English culture or British culture, or a process of cultural and/or linguistic change in which something non-English becomes English. It can also refer to the influen ...

version of the Irish word ''bábhún'' (sometimes spelt ''badhún''), possibly meaning "cattle-stronghold" or "cattle-enclosure".See alternative traditional spellings under ''badhbhdhún'' in ''Foclóir Uí Dhuinnín'': http://www.scriobh.ie/Page.aspx?id=26&l=1. The standard modern spelling is ''bábhún'': Ó Domhnaill, Niall (eag.), ''Foclóir Gaeilge Béarla'', Baile Átha Cliath: Oifig an tSoláthair (1977), p. 73. The Irish word for "cow" is ''bó'' and its plural is ''ba''. The Irish word for "stronghold, enclosure" is ''dún'', whose

genitive case In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can a ...

is ''dúin'". The original purpose of bawns was to protect cattle from attack. They included

trench A trench is a type of excavation or in the ground that is generally deeper than it is wide (as opposed to a wider gully, or ditch), and narrow compared with its length (as opposed to a simple hole or pit). In geology, trenches result from ero ...

es that were often strengthened with stakes or hedges. Over time, these were gradually replaced by walls. The name then began to be used for the walls that were built around tower houses. English and Scottish names for the same thing include "pele" (hence pele tower) and " barmkin".

References

External links

Bellaghy - Bawn
Fortification (architectural elements) * {{fort-type-stub

See also

References

External links