I.  The count that won’t settle

Every history of the O’Dubhda begins with a number. The Wikipedia list, drawn from Conor Mac Hale’s research, names twenty castles. Tony Dowd’s family archives reference twenty-four castles and fifty-two towns. Local historians in Tireragh quietly suspect there are more still.

We have identified, documented, and published individual pages for ten of those sites — the castles you can find in the Castle Tour. This page is for the rest: the sites we know existed, but which we have not yet matched to standing masonry, to a verified location, or to a single identifiable place on a map.

A living ledger. Every entry below is a working stub. When a site graduates to a confirmed find — with a townland, a set of walls, and a defensible claim on the historical record — it moves off this page and into the main Castles index. The archive here grows shorter, not longer, as the research proceeds.

II.  What counts as “lost”

We keep the definition narrow. A castle is listed here only if no identifiable fortification remains are standing and no confirmed site on the ground has been matched to the name. The moment we confirm a set of walls, a mapped townland, or a surviving earthwork, the site is no longer lost — it may still be a ruin, but it is findable, and it belongs with the rest of the Castles pages.

Three categories of uncertainty appear below:

The Vanished. Known to have existed from historical records, but no physical trace survives and no map or tradition fixes them to a single place.

Mapped, but unverified. A townland is named in older records; walking the ground has not yet turned up confirmed remains. Either what survives is too eroded to read, or the recorded name may attach to a site we have already documented under a different name.

Later buildings on vanished castle sites. A later house or estate stands on or near a vanished O’Dubhda fortification. The modern structure is not the O’Dubhda castle, and in some cases is not even on the same spot. The original fortification is effectively gone.

III.  How entries get added

A site lands on this page when it meets at least one of the following:

• It appears in Conor Mac Hale’s list (1990) or in Tony Dowd’s family archives, and is not currently matched to one of the ten documented castle pages.
• It is named as an O’Dubhda fortification in the Annals, in the Down Survey of 1656–58 or its later redactions, or in John O’Donovan’s 1836 Ordnance Survey letters, and the location cannot be securely reconciled with a site currently mapped.
• It appears in early English cartography — Speed 1610, Boazio 1606, Down Survey barony maps — under a placename that no modern gazetteer or OS sheet can pin down.
• A credible local informant (historian, landowner, parish archivist) has reported walls, foundations, or a tradition that we have not yet been able to verify in the field.

If you have information that belongs here — or that would move a stub off this page and into the main Castles index — please get in touch.

IV.  Sources

• Patrick Mac Hale, The Ó Dubhda Family History (1990) — the twenty-castle list that has anchored subsequent research.
• John O’Donovan, Ordnance Survey Letters — County Sligo / County Mayo (1836), Royal Irish Academy.
• The Down Survey of Ireland, 1656–58 — parish and barony maps (what survives is held at Trinity College Dublin; much of the Sligo material was destroyed in an accidental fire at the Surveyor-General’s office in 1711).
• The Annals of the Four Masters and Annals of Loch Cé — for campaign references and castle burnings.
• Tony Dowd family archives — referencing twenty-four castles and fifty-two towns.