A tiny Irish island holds the secrets of an unknown royal way of life

By JARRETT A. LOBELL

March/April 2020

From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, the MacDermots ruled the kingdom of Maigh Luirg in the Irish province of Connacht from a small island in Loch Cé (now Lough Key) known as the Rock. They were the right-hand men—and sometime rivals—of the O’Conors, the kings of Connacht, whose power center lay at the modern village of Tulsk, some 20 miles away. It was Diarmait, king of Maigh Luirg from 1124 until his death on the Rock in 1159, who gave the MacDermot clan its name. In the sixteenth century, the king Brian MacDermot commissioned the Annals of Loch Cé, which remain among the most important written records of medieval Irish history. They are the primary source for the history of the kingdom of Maigh Luirg (Anglicized as Moylurg), which occupied roughly the same territory as the northern section of the modern county of Roscommon. The Annals, which survive in only two manuscripts written primarily in Early Modern Irish, with some sections in Latin, were compiled using earlier Irish annals as sources. They record more than five centuries of political, ecclesiastical, and military events, succession and land disputes, and even notes on the weather. They begin with the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, a contest that pitted Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland, against a coalition composed of the king of Dublin, Sigtrygg Silkbeard; the king of Leinster, Máel Mórda; and a force of Vikings from across the region. The Annals end in 1590, when most of the Gaelic families in Ireland, including the MacDermots, were thrown off their lands by the Anglo-Normans—the ruling class of England after the Norman Conquest in 1066—who had invaded Ireland centuries earlier, in 1169. Surprisingly, there are relatively few references to the Rock of Loch Cé itself in the Annals, or in other contemporaneous historical works. In 1187 (or 1184, scholars are not certain), the Annals record that lightning struck the island, causing a fire. In 1207, the king Tomaltach MacDermot died on the Rock. A further reference is made to a siege of the island in 1235 by an Anglo-Norman force. During the attack, the invaders used siege engines called perriers and fireboats made from demolished wooden houses. The siege forced the MacDermots to abandon the island for a decade. Then, over the next three and a half centuries, the Annals record periodic attacks on the Rock, countless clashes over succession, and the deaths of numerous MacDermot kings. But with only one exception—the mention of a “great, regal house” that was built on the Rock in 1578 by Brian MacDermot—nowhere are the buildings of a royal residence ever described. The sand-colored stone walls, turrets, and empty windows that can be seen on the Rock today, though picturesque, are not the remains of a MacDermot stronghold, but a product of the imagination of John Nash, the nineteenth-century Welsh architect of Buckingham Palace. In the seventeenth century, an Anglo-Irish noble family named the Kings took possession of the Rock. More than a century later, Robert Edward King commissioned Nash to build the Gothic-style folly, the ruins of which are now visible on the Rock and on guidebook covers, restaurant walls, and travel posters. But it is the MacDermots’ much earlier castle—hidden, perhaps, by crumbling walls, creeping vegetation, and feet of mud—that archaeologist Thomas Finan of Saint Louis University has now set out to find. Sidebars: The Castle of Heroes Medieval Cattle Raiders

Finan and his team are searching not just for the remains of walls, but for an entire way of life. Scholars know very little about how the Gaelic kings lived, and what they do know derives primarily from Irish annals and other historical sources, many of which carry the bias of the Anglo-Norman rulers hailing from the opposite side of the Shannon River, which splits the west of Ireland from the east. So little is understood about the kings of Maigh Luirg—and other royal families, including the O’Conors, O’Flahertys, and O’Reillys—largely because Irish archaeology has been dominated by the study of Neolithic, Iron Age, and early Christian Ireland, as well as Anglo-Norman castles, which, unlike Gaelic sites, are easily identifiable in the landscape. And, over the past three decades, urban archaeology tied to construction projects has skewed the evidence in favor of medieval city dwellers who were not, it seems, the lords of the country. Furthermore, unlike the Anglo-Normans, the Gaelic kings did not keep detailed estate inventories and accounts. Coupled with the absence of archaeological evidence to the contrary, this has tempted many scholars of medieval western Ireland to agree with the twelfth-century historian Giraldus Cambrensis, who argued that the Gaelic kings did not build castles. Whether Giraldus’ words were a poorly disguised attempt to portray the Irish as uncivilized in contrast to his Anglo-Norman patrons, or an accurate appraisal is debatable. “Giraldus wrote that the Irish were all living in timber huts and went into battle with little or no armor,” says Finan. “‘They don’t build castles, they don’t do this, they don’t do that’—and this narrative was accepted until things started to change a few decades ago.” In fact, explains Finan, no high medieval power center, or caput, from the Latin for “head,” of which there are many in the west of Ireland, has ever been fully excavated. At Lough Key, Finan and his team are just starting to create a picture of what a residence for a family as high status as the MacDermots—their castle—might have looked like. “We aren’t rewriting history here, we are writing it,” says Finan. “We can now start to link the archaeology to these historical sources. It’s really starting to happen. This site is like a text to me, and the archaeology is creating the narrative.” In 2007, archaeologist Niall Brady of the Archaeological Diving Company undertook the first underwater archaeological survey of the waters around the Rock. He wanted to find out whether the island is a natural one or an artificial crannog, as well as what types of archaeological material lay on the lakebed. Brady’s team found that the western half of the island was naturally formed of rocks and large boulders. He had expected to identify timber pilings or other indications that, like its eastern half, the entire island was artificially constructed. “In this way the site is unusual in Ireland because, unlike most lake islands, it isn’t a crannog per se,” says Brady. The team also recorded a great deal of animal bone, some of it butchered, along with more recent champagne bottles and other debris that can, says Brady, be assigned to the feasts of nineteenth-century—not medieval—lords. Sidebars: The Castle of Heroes Medieval Cattle Raiders

At the same time, Finan, Brady, and Kieran O’Conor of National University of Ireland Galway surveyed the remains on the island, which had just been privately acquired and cleared of vegetation, making the ruins more visible than they had been in a century. O’Conor concluded that there was evidence for a tower house, which was recognizable by the presence of windows and arrow slots, two well-known features of such structures. Tower houses, common at later medieval lordly sites, were multistory fortified residences built at a time when the ruling classes of Ireland both west and east lived in fear of what they perceived as generalized lawlessness and danger posed by their subjects. Although it is known that these secure structures were built in locations where Gaelic lords already had settlements, “people were surprised about the Lough Key tower house,” says archaeologist James Schryver of the University of Minnesota Morris, who is part of Finan’s team. “They didn’t expect it to be there.” Finan thought that the tower house had been built in the Late Middle Ages (A.D. 1200–1450) and wasn’t able to identify any earlier structures on the Rock. It seemed that, despite the centuries-long prominence of the MacDermots, they had had no castle at their lordly residence, or even a large building, until the construction of the tower house. Perhaps the island had only been lightly defended with timber fortifications or a simple stone wall in the High Middle Ages (A.D. 1000–1200). Perhaps all the high medieval castles in Ireland were built in the east and the south by the Anglo-Normans. Perhaps Giraldus Cambrensis had been correct all along. But Finan had his doubts. “You could explain the absences either by saying Giraldus Cambrensis was right or, more interestingly, by saying maybe he was right in one sense, in that the Gaelic lords didn’t live in traditional European castles, but that that doesn’t mean they didn’t build well-fortified stone structures and have their own architectural language. He didn’t actually see what they were living in, and didn’t pick up on the fact that their language of power and authority was different.” It is clear, for example, judging from the copious stone monasteries and churches that were constructed at the time, that the Gaelic lords were more than competent builders. “One of the key features of Irish lordship and one of the ways you achieved legitimacy was by building on the landscape,” says Finan. Exactly what the medieval Gaelic kings were building is an open question. In Anglo-Norman Ireland, and across medieval France, Germany, and the Holy Land, kings, lords, and Crusaders constructed the type of large, walled, often moated fortified stone buildings that immediately come to mind with the mention of a castle. “Those types of castles are intimately tied to and are a function of the social structure of those places, which is to say, feudalism,” says Finan. In medieval Europe, the feudal system governed the relationships between the king and nobility, and between the nobility and peasants with respect to land tenancy, serfdom, and the exchange of lands for military service, all of which were centered on the castle. However, explains Finan, feudalism was not the dominant social system in western Ireland, including Connacht, which remained in Gaelic hands. Instead, there were multiple kings at one time and professional classes of historians, clerics, lawyers, and poets, along with the peasants who worked the land. “If you are looking at the whole landscape of high medieval Ireland, it includes these dynastic professions, one of which was a learned class of historians who composed works like the Annals of Loch Cé,” says Finan. One such family of historians, the O’Malconnors, was set up in a settlement south of the Rock and became part of the MacDermots’ retinue. “I thought, what is an Irish castle, if one were to be found?” says Finan. “Does it look enough like a European castle to call it a castle, but reflect an entirely different social structure that is native and local?” With this in mind, Finan returned to Lough Key in 2018. “We have this high-status site that’s very visible, but actually not all that well known,” says Finan. “It’s mentioned in the Annals and it’s surrounded by three important monasteries located on other islands in the lake, by agricultural fields, and a church—all the hallmarks of the Middle Ages—but where was everyone, including the kings, living?” Sidebars: The Castle of Heroes Medieval Cattle Raiders

The first step was a geophysical survey of the island’s western side that detected the presence of buried structures, including a possible floor surface or entranceway. The following year Finan began to excavate. He was concerned that the builders of the nineteenth-century folly had scraped the island clean and thrown everything—much of which Brady had seen in his underwater survey—over the side before leveling it out for the new construction. “We anticipated having to dig through mounds of nineteenth-century construction fill and stone,” says Finan. But the fill wasn’t nearly as deep as he expected, and what the folly builders had actually scraped off were the remains from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no evidence of which was found apart from a single pipestem. “Six inches from the surface, and we were in the Middle Ages,” says Finan. In their first excavation season, Finan’s team uncovered evidence of what he believes was the MacDermots’ castle. This includes two possibly high medieval structures, one with a clay floor, and, underneath the buildings, what may be the entranceway that was part of an earlier fortification suggested by the geophysical survey. The archaeologists have also found that the stone wall surrounding the island appears to have had three or even four phases, the earliest of which predates the structures. Taken together, their finds are beginning to suggest the presence of a large stone fort with a 10-foot-wide wall that may have had a much higher timber superstructure. This wooden feature may have accounted for one of the numerous fires recorded in the Annals, evidence of which Finan’s team has identified in the ground, in the form of bits of burned wood. As surprising as the identification of the Rock’s tower house may have been, the discovery of signs of a castle has been much more so. It seems the MacDermots may indeed have built, lived in, and defended an Irish castle. “It changes everything,” says archaeologist Daniel Curley of the National University of Ireland Galway. “Gaelic archaeology needs a reset button because there are still so many basic questions about culture, lifestyle, and economics. To have excavated a lordly site is massive.” In addition to monasteries, castles, and agriculture, other integral elements of medieval European life included feasting, hunting, games, and poetry and genealogy recitations. (See “The Castle of Heroes.”) Late sixteenth-century woodcuts by the English artist John Derricke show scenes of Gaelic life that include Irish lords feasting, although they are depicted doing so outdoors, not in a hall or castle. Like Giraldus Cambrensis, however, Derricke likely sought to promote a negative vision of Gaelic lordship. Feasts are mentioned in such sources as the medieval national epic, the Cattle Raid of Cooley (see “Medieval Cattle Raiders”), and in this and other myths a good leader is measured by his generosity, including sharing the best cuts of meat. “This isn’t a world for introverts,” says Schryver. “Kings have social duties, including hosting feasts, and you aren’t going to make it if you don’t.” Until the recent excavations on the Rock, very little archaeological evidence of feasting had been found at any Gaelic lordly settlement. Now, however, Finan’s team has uncovered a vast amount of pig and cow bone, including many joints providing evidence that the kings saved the choicest cuts for their feasts. In the medieval period, as it does today, the mostly rural county of Roscommon had some of the most fertile land in Ireland, and the wealth of the Irish kings, much as the wealth of the modern county, lay in cattle. The kings used cattle as a food source and for raw materials, of course, but the animals’ importance transcended the utilitarian. “Cattle are the coin of the day, the means to buy high-value and high-status gold objects,” says Schryver. “They are also the way status is measured and conferred.” Farmers were ranked according to how many head of cattle they owned, and categories of wealth were established using, for example, the value of a female slave or of so many head of cattle, which varied depending on whether the animals were cows or more valuable bulls. Along with the pig and cow bones, Finan’s team has found a tusk from a very large boar that was likely hunted on MacDermot lands and then taken to the Rock to be butchered and eaten. The team has also identified fish bones, more evidence of what the MacDermots were eating. “Now we will be able to say something about the dietary habits of the high-class Irish lords, which is something we have never been able to do before,” says Finan. Sidebars: The Castle of Heroes Medieval Cattle Raiders