Castletown (Cottlestown) Castle

Baile Uí Choitil — “O’Cottle’s townland” — a late-sixteenth-century O’Dubhda fortified house in the barony of Tireragh

In the quiet countryside of Cottlestown townland, a short distance inland from the River Moy in north-west Sligo, stands a remarkably intact ruin of a four-bay, three-storey fortified house. Known locally as O’Dowd’s Castle, it is one of the most substantial surviving structures on the traditional list of twenty O’Dubhda fortifications — and one of the very few for which both the standing fabric and the family association can be securely identified. By the middle of the seventeenth century the O’Dowd had been dispossessed of it, and the house passed through Cromwellian, Williamite, and early-Victorian hands before settling into its present role as a silent landmark in the fields behind the later Castletown Manor.

I. The Place: Cottlestown Townland, Parish of Castleconor

The castle stands in the townland of Cottlestown (Irish: Baile Uí Choitil), in the civil parish of Castleconor (Caisleán Mhic Conchúir), barony of Tireragh (Tír Fhiachrach) — the coastal Sligo heartland of the O’Dubhda.

The townland name is not, as sometimes claimed, a variant of Baile an Chaisleáin (“town of the castle”). John O’Donovan, in his 1836 Ordnance Survey Name Books for County Sligo, glosses it as Baile Uí Choitil, “O’Cottle’s town” — the townland of a family surnamed Ó Coitil (anglicised Cottle). The name is recorded in documentary sources back to the late sixteenth century (Ballicottell 1584, Cottelton 1585, Ballycottell 1588, Ballychottell 1593, Cotletowne 1617, Cottells towne 1659, Cottlestowne 1665, and Cottlestown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1836). The alternative name Castletown — used by the local R.C. chapel and by later proprietors for their house — is a secondary, later overlay on the original Irish form, attached to the place because of the castle that still stands in it.

An 1836 descriptive remark from the Ordnance Survey field notes records simply that there was “an old castle said to be built about the time of Cromwell’s invasions” in the townland — a folk memory that is very nearly right.

II. Cottlestown in the O’Dubhda Kingdom

According to the tradition set out by clan historian Conor Mac Hale in The O’Dubhda Family History (1990), the O’Dubhda “forged a kingdom in Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe (Northwest Connacht) which they ringed with 20 castles.” Cottlestown is one of those twenty, and — along with Ardnaglass, Roslee and a handful of others — it is one of the relatively small number on that list where a direct O’Dubhda castle can be matched to a still-standing stone fortification.

A caveat on dating. Earlier versions of this page placed Cottlestown in the 13th or 14th century. No evidence supports that. The standing building is securely dated by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage to c. 1600, and the townland itself is not recorded in written sources before 1584. If there was an earlier O’Dubhda fortification on or near this site, as is possible, no physical trace of it has been securely identified. The surviving ruin belongs to the very last phase of O’Dubhda tenure in Tireragh, not to its medieval beginnings.

III. The Building: A Fortified House of c. 1600

The architectural record is exceptionally good for Cottlestown. The site is Registered Monument and is comprehensively described in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH reg. 32402204), which gives it a national rating and notes its archaeological and architectural special interest:

A detached four-bay three-storey rubble stone fortified house, built c. 1600, rectangular on plan, with bartizans to the south-east and north-west corners carried on pointed corbels, a parapet string course, and a battered base. Square-headed window openings to the upper storeys retain rendered reveals and stone sills; several defensive slit openings survive to the ground floor, with dressed-stone chamfered surrounds and hood moulds. The main south elevation has a slightly projecting parapet. Roof missing; rendered corbelled chimneystacks to east and west gables.

— NIAH Registration No. 32402204, summarised

The appraisal describes the house as “remarkably intact,” with substantial sections of the original lime render still visible on the rubble limestone walling and what may be original timberwork retained internally. A rubble stone wall links the south-west corner of the building to the north wall of a corn mill to the south, suggesting the house once sat within a wider functional complex.

The form — a rectangular, loopholed, bartizaned house with a domestic character layered over a defensive shell — places Cottlestown firmly in the fortified house tradition of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean decades, rather than the earlier tower-house idiom. In that it resembles the bartizaned houses at Ballylee or at Derrylahan more than it does the plain tower houses elsewhere on the O’Dubhda list.

IV. 1653: Dispossession and the Morgan Grant

Cottlestown was lost to the O’Dowd under the Cromwellian Settlement. The lands of Cottlestown in Castleconor parish were granted, in or around 1653, to Captain Robert Morgan, a Cromwellian cavalry officer — one of some 7,000 New Model Army veterans settled in Ireland in lieu of pay. The grant is noted in Morgan-family genealogical records and is consistent with the Down Survey settlement pattern for this part of Tireragh.

Morgan did not occupy the fortified house itself. He built, or began to build, a new residence a short distance to the south-east of the ruin. That later house, rebuilt and enlarged in the early nineteenth century (c. 1820), survives today as Castletown House or Castletown Manor (NIAH reg. 32402203) — a four-bay, two-storey-over-basement rendered country house with a notable ashlar limestone doorcase and “elaborate sunburst fanlight,” its south pile added to an older eighteenth-century block. It is a separate, Georgian-era building, and should not be confused with the O’Dowd’s fortified house in the field behind it.

By the time of Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary (1837), the Cottlestown estate had passed into the hands of the Kirkwood family:

“The principal seats are Moyview, that of the Hon. Colonel Wingfield; Cottlestown, of S. Kirkwood, Esq.; Knockroe House, of G. Ruttledge, Esq.”

— Lewis 1837, Castle-Connor parish entry

The estate was later held by the Boyd family, according to the Landed Estates Database at the University of Galway. The fortified house — already a ruin by the nineteenth century — stood throughout this time as an unoccupied antiquity in the grounds, as it does today.

V. Folklore

No folklore specifically attached to Cottlestown castle has been recovered from the Schools’ Collection (Bailiúchán na Scol, 1937–9) — a silence that is in itself significant. The Ardnaglass castle just along the coast is remembered in the Dog-and-Wolf legend of Beltra school; Cottlestown appears to have no comparable surviving oral tradition. Readers familiar with earlier versions of this page will note that a set of dramatic-sounding passages about “hidden treasures,” “secret tunnels,” and “spectral guardians” haunting the ruin have been removed. We have been unable to trace any of that material to Dúchas, Mac Hale, Lewis, or any other source, and we preferred to leave it out rather than repeat it as history.

VI. Visiting Cottlestown Today

Cottlestown Castle is on private farmland. It is not maintained as a public heritage site and there is no formal access arrangement. The ruin sits in a field in Cottlestown townland, north-west of the later Castletown Manor, off minor roads between Ballina and Dromore West.

Visitors are asked to view the castle only from public roadways unless the landowner’s permission has been sought and given. The standing masonry, though remarkably complete for its age, is unstable in places and is not stabilised. As with the other O’Dubhda castle sites, please treat the land, the stones, and the privacy of those who live alongside them with care.