ABSTRACT
Ireland is remarkable among the countries of western Europe for its scholarly neglect of its castles after the early years of this century. Then there were at least two major scholars working on the study, Thomas Westropp and Goddard Orpen. The latter was one of the key figures writing in English on the study of castles in the decade before the First World War. His greatness rests on two things. He recognised, as early as the more famous Ella Armitage in England, that earthworks were as much castles as were masonry structures. He also was a great historian, who combined the physical and the documentary evidence when he wrote about an individual castle. To him castles told a story just as much as did royal documents, and on the one hand he used their evidence in his histories, while on the other he never stopped at mere description in his account; the castles were evidence to be interpreted and expounded. Westropp was less concerned with the grand sweep of history. He was a great gatherer of information about individual castles, from documentary sources and particularly from the field evidence; he was also concerned not just with the medieval period but with monuments of all dates, but mainly in his native south-west of Ireland.
