Roslee Castle, Easkey

A coastal stronghold of the Ó Dubhda

Roslee Castle stands on a low ledge of rock beside Easkey pier, on the north Sligo coast in the civil parish of Easkey, barony of Tireragh. It is the most substantial surviving fortification of the Ó Dubhda territory in this stretch of Tireragh, and the best-preserved of the several O’Dowd sites traditionally associated with the Easkey district.

I. Setting

The castle occupies a small promontory of sedimentary rock at the mouth of the Easkey River, directly over Sligo Bay. The tower — by local reckoning some 63 feet at its highest surviving point, known locally as the Sailor’s Bed — is the dominant element of the site and the only part of the castle that now survives. The approach is over open grass and shore boulders; on a clear day the view reaches from Aughris Head across to the mountains of north Mayo.

The heritage trail sign erected at the pier by the local Livin’ in Easkey And Proud (LEAP) group counts Roslee as stop 10 on its walk, and notes at stop 12 that a second castle — Castletown Castle, in the neighbouring townland of Castletown — was also an O’Dowd property. Tradition in Easkey holds that the O’Dowds had “five castles in this townland”; Roslee is the one that still stands to any height.

II. The archaeological record

The castle is a Recorded Monument (SMR SL011-020). The Sites and Monuments Record describes a three-storey rectangular keep, some 12 m by 9 m with walls over 2 m thick, a slight base batter, a barrel vault over the ground floor, mural stairways in the thickness of the walls and a garderobe in the north-west angle. The original entrance, now blocked, was at the north end of the east wall. Bigari’s 1779 drawing for Grose’s Antiquities of Ireland shows the keep with an adjoining building and a bawn wall running north from its north-west angle. Across the river mouth, a small fortification with a gun port and nine musket loops, probably of seventeenth-century date (recorded as Castletown Castle, SMR SL011-019), stands on the west side of the river.

III. Documented ownership

Roslee enters the written record two centuries before the Stuart grants: the Annals of Connacht record at 1414 the death at Roslee of Maghnus son of Domhnall, “guest-house of the Ui Fiachrach Muaide”, whom Mac Hale (1990) counts among the Ó Dubhda. On 2 July 1618 King James I granted to Daniel O’Dowd “two castles, a kitchen, and a bakehouse within the bawn of Rosslee.” The wording is precious: it tells us that by 1618 the complex already contained more than one building within an enclosing wall, consistent with the keep, adjoining building and bawn wall shown in Bigari’s drawing of 1779.

In the first years of James I the castle was held by the McDonnells: the General Pardon of 1603 names three McDonnells “of Rosslee”. The 1618 grant gave it to Daniel O’Dowd, but the Ó Dubhda hold did not outlast the wars that began in 1641: among the new Commonwealth proprietors recorded at the Census of 1659, James Ormsby held Rosslee. The Landed Estates Database (University of Galway, estate 197) records the Browne family at Fortland in 1786, succeeded by the Jones family, who were in possession by 1814 and still held the estate in 1837. Following the Great Famine the Jones estate was placed before the Encumbered Estates Court, and in March 1854 was purchased by Richard Graves Brinkley. The Fortland estate remained in Brinkley ownership into the twentieth century; John L. Brinkley is recorded as proprietor in 1906. At Griffith’s Valuation in the late 1850s the estate was let to John Wingfield King.

A plan and drawing made by Bigari in 1779, engraved in the first volume of Grose’s Antiquities of Ireland, show a bawn wall extending north from the north-west angle of the tower; that stretch of wall is no longer visible above ground.

IV. The 1207 tradition

The LEAP heritage-trail sign at the pier, and many guidebooks, state that Roslee was “originally built in 1207 for Oliver McDonnell, who came to the area to marry an O’Dowd widow.” The story is older than the sign: the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1836 already record that the castle was built by Oliver McDonnell in 1207 and stayed in that family until 1549. This reading is well established in local memory and deserves to be recorded.

Historically, however, the date is difficult. The McDonnell gallowglass families do not appear in Irish annals until the mid-thirteenth century at the earliest, and the settled McDonnell and MacSweeney presence in the north-west is a fourteenth- and fifteenth-century phenomenon. Nothing in the visible fabric has been shown to be as early as 1207. It is possible that an earlier Ó Dubhda fortification stood on or near the rock before the present tower, but no part of it has been securely identified on the ground or in the record. The 1207 story is best treated as cherished local tradition alongside, rather than instead of, the archaeological record.

V. The wider Easkey cluster

Roslee is the best survivor of several O’Dowd sites in the Easkey district. The LEAP trail identifies Castletown Castle in the neighbouring townland of Castletown (Baile an Chaisleáin), crediting it to the O’Mailduns or Murphys in 1157 and later to the O’Dowds. Duald Mac Firbis’s Hy-Fiachrach genealogies record the O’Mailduns as an older family seated in this stretch of Tireragh, which gives some substance to the Castletown tradition even if the 1157 date is unverified. Ardnarea (Ard na Riadh, near Ballina) a short distance west along the coast is another direct Ó Dubhda site. Taken together, the Easkey – Ardnarea – Castleconnor arc formed the heart of the Ó Dubhda coastal territory of Tireragh.

VI. Visiting today

The castle sits beside Easkey pier and is freely accessible at any time. There is no formal path, no interpretive panel apart from the LEAP sign at the pier, and no guard-rails on the ruin. Visitors climb at their own risk.

From the modern south-wall entrance — a later insertion in what was originally a window — a hidden spiral stair tucked behind a low archway on the right gives access to the upper levels of the tower and to the Sailor’s Bed at the top. Lower passages inside the thickness of the wall can also be explored by the nimble. Uneven steps, low lintels and open drops are all present: this is genuinely one of the more atmospheric climbs on the Ó Dubhda castle tour, but it is not for those uneasy with heights or confined spaces.

Outside the walls the rock shore and tidal pools are a popular spot for fossil-hunting and for watching the Atlantic swell. The waves off Easkey are among the best in Europe for surfing, and the castle and the surfers have shared the same stretch of bay for as long as anyone can remember.

The continued survival of the ruin owes a great deal to the Save the Castle Fund, established by Easkey residents in the 1980s to carry out urgent consolidation work. Without that local effort the tower would almost certainly have lost more of its fabric to winter storms.