ABSTRACT
If first we examine the available archaeological evidence for motte construction in Ireland it immediately becomes apparent that the number of such castles which have actually been excavated is very small, with much of the work having been carried out in Ulster. The first published distribution map of mottes in Ireland was completed by Orpen in 1911 and shows all the mottes that were known to him, whether surviving or destroyed, in relation to the topography of the island.5 Then in 1973 R.E. Glasscock mapped 340 mottes extant in Ireland which had no stone buildings on them, 184 in the Province of Leinster, 128 in Ulster,
24 in Munster and only 4 in Connacht.6 These figures must be regarded as being minimum totals as they were arrived at mainly from cartographic research, except for Ulster where McNeill visited the sites on the ground, and further research (by Graham in Counties Meath and Westmeath,7 the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in Counties Louth and Meath,8 and D.A.Caulfield in Co. Kilkenny9) has revealed higher numbers of mottes than Glasscock’s original county totals. Nevertheless, the greatest density of mottes are still to be found in the eastern half of the island as shown on Glasscock’s map (fig. 8). Of the mottes that have been excavated most of the evidence would date their construction to some time in the period 1170 to 1230. In Co. Down, where the great majority of excavation has taken place, the occupation dates that have been produced all fall into the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. But these excavations have usually been concentrated on the summits of the mottes so that the current state of our knowledge as regards the
chronology and structures of the baileys and other subsidiary features is very rudimentary.
