Newtown castle was built on a small rise on the north-east shore of Lough Gill, opposite the mouth of the River Bonnet. Two images of the now destroyed Duroy castle the photo on the left was published by Kilgannon in 1926, while the image on the right, which shows the complexity of the structure, is dated to 1930. Castle Duroy is a site that would repay excavation. However the remaining portion blew down in a storm, and the site is quite ruined with only the stump of a corner remaining today, located within a small area which was enclosed by a ditch.
The remains of one corner belonging to the towerhouse, which was at least four stories tall, was still visible in 1930. The second towerhouse was constructed on a small promontory at Duroy, 500 meters east of Newtown castle. This mysterious glen is ultimately the key to understanding the location of Duroy and Newtown castles: they protect the entrance to the Alt, which would have served as a quarry for building materials, a refuge in times of danger, and a gigantic cattle pen. The O'Rourke castle at Newtown was one of a pair of towerhouses, which flanked the mouth of the stream which flows out from the cleft called the Alt or Cartron Glen, close by. The foundations of the original towerhouse, Newtown castle which was discovered in 1971, are visible in the courtyard. A branch of the O'Rourke family established a village, Baile Nua or Newtown, in this location sometime after the Battle of Magh Slécht in 1256 about the same time, the Normans were beginning to arrive in force in Sligo, where they founded the Dominican abbey and built Sligo castle. I have chosen to refer to this site as Newtown Castle, which belonged to Sir Brian O'Rourke and was one of his chief residences, rather than by the later manor house built by and named after Robert Parke. Leaving out the restoration work that has been carried out in more recent times, in order to make the site accessible to the public, the building as it now stands has remained largely unaltered since the end of the seventeenth century.Īrchaeology, history and architecture, 2011. Overlooking the northern shores of Lough Gill, the castle has had several different phases of occupation.
Newtown Castle | O'Rourke's Castle | Parke's Castleįew castles in Ireland have a more beautiful setting or a more enigmatic history than Parke's Castle, County Leitrim. Parke's Castle, a fortified manor house built around 1630 using the site and stones of the earlier Newtown Castle which belonged to Sir Brian O'Rourke.
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