Trim Castle

Today's Castle is Trim, on the banks of the River Boyne 50 miles from the sea, the largest of the Norman castles in Ireland.

In the twelfth century Ireland had no strong central leadership, and it presented a tempting target to the restless Norman knights raising big, land-hungry families in England and Wales. Norman knights began crossing the Irish Sea in the 1160s, and several set up small baronies along the Irish coast. In 1169, a large group of Norman freebooters joined the cause of Diarmait Mac Murchada, the exiled King of Leinster -- Prince Dermod to his new friends -- and these mercenaries crossed to Ireland and put him back on his throne. They were led by Gilbert de Clare, known as Strongbow, who married Diarmait's daughter Aife and was declared Diarmait's heir to the throne of Leinster. (Leinster, one of the traditional four kingdoms of Ireland, was roughly the southeastern part of the island.)

So a Norman foothold had been gained, but no more. Then in 1171 the powerful Henry II, king of England and half of France, overlord of Scotland and Wales, decided to intervene. He landed in Ireland with a sizable army, determined both to expand his power and restore order to Ireland. While Henry was in Ireland, most of the Irish lords thought submission was the better part of valor, as did the leaders of the Irish church. The secular lords signed a treaty recognizing Henry as their overlord, and the bishops and abbots attended a Synod at Cashel and agreed to reorganize their church according to Continental practice. Henry divided the island, confirming the Normans in the lands they had seized but guaranteeing the rest to the Irish who still held it.

Among the Norman lords who had come to Ireland was Hugh de Lacy. Henry made him lord of the Liberty of Meath, and in 1172 de Lacy began building Castle Trim to serve as his seat. The first construction was wooden, protected by a pallisade, ditch, and bank.

But Henry soon had to leave to deal with other events in his large empire (including the murder of Thomas Becket), and Diarmait died. The Irish lords immediately tore up their agreement with Henry and went to war. Hugh de Lacy's wooden castle proved inadequate protection. Within months of Henry's departure the forces of self-proclaimed High King Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair -- alias Roderick of Connaught --burned the fortress to the ground. But de Lacy returned and built again.

In 1176 the foundations of the great stone keep were laid, and work on the stone curtain wall began. This was the usual lax medieval sort of operation, and the walls were not completed until 1224.

Plan of the keep, which has the sort of unnecessary symmetry beloved of some castle architects.

The castle belonged to a series of powerful Anglo-Irish lords in the thirteenth century, and they continued to add to its defenses and amenities. Above is the barbican, added in the 1290s. The castle eventually fell to the great heiress Joan de Geneville, who married Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, the same one who became Queen Isabella's lover and overthrew Edward II. Mortimer lived here while he was serving as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in 1316 to 1318.

In 1536 the castle was besieged for the first time since the 13th century. The besiegers were the men of Silken Thomas, a son of an Earl of Kildare who had been locked in the Tower by Henry VIII. Thomas tried to get the people behind him by declaring his revolt a Catholic reaction against Henry's religious reforms, but nobody believed him and his revolt fizzled out. The castle saw fighting again in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, and it was garrisoned and readied for defense during the Irish invasion scares of the Napoleonic period. Then it was part of the lands granted to Arthur Wellesley when he became the Duke of Wellington. During the nineteenth century it was abandoned and sank into ruin.

In 1971 archaeologists digging at the castle uncovered the bodies of ten headless men, a nice reminder of the medieval habit of beheading rebels and highwaymen and displaying their heads on spikes above castle or town gates.