Qualla: Carrickmines Castle

Carrickmines Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Three hundred people were killed here in 1642. Four hundred years later, in 2002, activists who called themselves the Carrickminders camped on the same ground to stop another kind of destruction - the M50 motorway, Dublin's orbital ring road, which was about to be cut directly through the buried remains of one of the most important medieval fortifications in the country. The Supreme Court eventually ruled against them. The road went through. Sections of the castle's medieval walls and parts of its defensive structures were preserved beneath new roundabouts. Forty thousand artefacts were retrieved from the soil before the bulldozers arrived. What stands today on the southern edge of Dublin is a strange palimpsest: a Norman fortress whose stones support a junction of one of Ireland's busiest motorways.

Read more: Carrickmines Castle on Qualla

Image: Sarah777 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Carrickmines Castle: Guarding the Pale

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at en.wikipedia, Public domain. Carrickmines began as a Hiberno-Norse settlement and grew, during the twelfth century, into a fortified Norman castle and village on the frontier between English-controlled Dublin and the Gaelic chiefdoms of Wicklow. It was a major link in the chain of fortifications around the P...

Read more: Carrickmines Castle on Qualla

Image: Sarah777 at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Carrickmines Castle: The Massacre of 1642

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at en.wikipedia, Public domain. When the Irish Rebellion of 1641 broke out and evolved into the Irish Confederate Wars, the Catholic Walshs of Carrickmines sided with the native Irish and with the Confederate attempt to create an independent Irish parliament. They paid the price the following year. English forc...

Read more: Carrickmines Castle on Qualla

Image: Sarah777 at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Carrickmines Castle: The Carrickminders

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777, Public domain. In 1983 the planned route of the M50 had been drawn around the castle site, on the advice of a state agency that recognized its archaeological importance. In 1998 the route was rerouted directly through it. When the National Roads Authority moved to demolish the ruins in 2002, th...

Read more: Carrickmines Castle on Qualla

Image: Sarah777 | Public domain

Carrickmines Castle: A Castle Under a Roundabout

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at en.wikipedia, Public domain. The NRA's preservation plan eventually saved what it could. Six million euros went into excavations over two years. Archaeologists retrieved more than forty thousand artefacts - weapons, coins, pottery, the remains of the 1642 dead. Sections of the medieval walls and parts of the...

Read more: Carrickmines Castle on Qualla

Image: Sarah777 at en.wikipedia | Public domain