fl.ny.minnesota.ie: Medieval Castles

I`ve mentioned before that I took an Archaeology class this semester called "The Development of the Castle in Medieval Europe." A 300-word paper (90% of the overall marks) was the very last assignment I had to worry about and I turned it in last week. While I thought it was a relatively interesting class, it was honestly probably my least favorite of the semester - or at least the class I felt least invested in. I really enjoyed our lecturers -Kieran always looked like a gentle grizzly bear and Rory was just a great character who clearly took his castle business very seriously. All the same, the lectures often felt really repetitive and we didn't get much new information each time. We must have spent the first 4-5 weeks just establishing the fact that timber castles were more popular than masonry ones, and that they weren't simply "temporary fortresses built in an invasion context." (He practically beat us over the head with that phrase.) After the first few weeks, I felt like I had already gotten the point. I kind of wish they had given us assigned readings to correspond with the lectures, and then it maybe would have been a little more interesting to follow what they talked about during lectures. I wound up writing my final paper on the timber castles since they were pretty much new to me before taking the class, but it was hard to come up with anything original or exciting to write about, which made it awfully difficult to care too much about it. Oh well. I hope it came out alright.

The best part about the course (I might go so far as to say one of the only redeeming factors) was a day trip we took at the very end. They bused us around for several hours, taking us to neighboring counties to visit four different sites: a towerhouse; a later, Renaissance-influenced castle; the remains of a castle and the monastery at Clon Macnoise; and finally, a surviving earthwork mound that onced supported a motte (timber) castle. I only have a few photos from the sites - after a while, I realized that many of the awe-inspiring factors of the places I've seen in Ireland don't really translate well in photographs. Here are some of the few I did take though:

I really loved running around the Towerhouse (which is usually closed to the public), standing at the arrowloops and sneaking up the stone spiral staircases watching out for murder holes and traps. It was like a playground from the 16th century.