Ardnarea Castle

Ard na Riagh — “Hill of Executions” — An O’Dubhda Tower House above the Moy

On the east bank of the River Moy, overlooking what is now Ballina, Co. Mayo, once stood a 15th-century tower house of the Ó Dubhda. Its exact site was lost to the archaeological record for almost two centuries before being identified afresh in 2024. The castle is listed by clan historian Conor Mac Hale among the twenty castles that ringed the kingdom of Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe.

I. The Place: Ardnaree or Shanaghy, Barony of Tireragh

The castle stood on the rise known locally as Palmyra Hill (also called Castlehill), in the townland of Ardnaree or Shanaghy (Ard na Ria nó Seanachaidh; logainm.ie), civil parish of Kilmoremoy, barony of Tireragh. Although the Moy is the traditional boundary between Mayo and Sligo — and the castle therefore lay on the old Sligo side — the townland was transferred to Co. Mayo under the Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898.

The placename itself is one of the most contested features of the site. John O’Donovan, recording local tradition for the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s, and the Dinnseanchus place-lore tradition he drew on, interpret the name as Ard na Riagh — “the Hill of Executions” or “Gallows Hill,” from Old Irish riagh, a place of hanging. A second gloss, Árd na Ríogh — “Hill of the Kings” — is sometimes repeated locally, but that reading belongs properly to the separate Ardnaree townland in Co. Donegal (logainm entry 15852). The execution tradition is the one tied to this site, and it is rooted in the folklore of the Four Maols (see §IV).

II. The Castle: An O’Dubhda Tower House, 1447

The castle is recorded by Conor Mac Hale in The Ó Dubhda Family History (1990) as one of the twenty castles the clan maintained across north-west Connacht. Mac Hale gives the year of its building as 1447. This is consistent with the broader 15th-century wave of Gaelic tower houses encouraged by the “ten-pound castle” subsidy statute of Henry VI (1429), which offered £10 to anyone raising a fortified tower of specified minimum size.

The site had been in Anglo-Norman hands earlier: the cantred of Tirereagh was granted in the 13th century to Peter de Bermingham, whose successors held Ardnaree into the 14th century. In 1371 the Ó Dubhda, in alliance with the Ó Conchobhair of Sligo, recovered Tireragh; clan tradition (as transmitted in Mac Hale) attributes the recovery of Ardnaree itself to Donnchadh Ó Dubhda. For the next century and a half the castle was contested between the Ó Dubhda and the Mayo Burkes. It was seized by the Burkes in 1530, briefly retaken, and lost definitively the following year — a pattern that gave rise to the proverb Súil Uí Dhubhda le hArd na Ríogh (“the Ó Dubhda’s hope for Ardnaree”), recorded by O’Donovan in his Irish Proverbs (Dublin Penny Journal, 1832) and used idiomatically for a long-cherished but unfulfilled hope.

After the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s the castle and its lands were granted to Robert Morgan, and O’Dubhda occupation of the site ended. The structure itself ceased to be inhabited by the close of the 17th century. Later references place ruined fragments on the hill as late as 1829, after which the site passed out of the archaeological record entirely.

III. The Battle of Ardnaree, 23 September 1586

The best-remembered event at this site has nothing to do with the castle itself. In September 1586, during the Tudor conquest of Connacht, a Scottish Gallowglass army — led by Donnell Gorm MacDonnell of Carey and Alexander Carragh MacDonnell of Glenarm, sons of the late James MacDonnell, 6th of Dunnyveg — had been brought into Connacht by the MacWilliam Burkes and the MacPhilbins to resist the campaign of Sir Richard Bingham, Lord President of Connacht. The mercenary column had shadowed English positions at Sligo, Coolooney and Ballinafad for some two weeks before making camp on the east bank of the Moy at Ardnaree.

Bingham force-marched his army overnight from Leyny and attacked at dawn on 23 September 1586. Both MacDonnell leaders were killed. Contemporary and near-contemporary estimates of the dead vary — the Annals of the Four Masters and later writers give figures between roughly 1,500 and 3,000, including a large number of the women and children travelling with the camp — but the outcome was unambiguous: the mercenary column was effectively destroyed, many were drowned fleeing into the Moy, and the Burke rising collapsed soon afterwards.

The battle took place at the foot of the hill on which the castle stood. The Augustinian Abbey founded by the Ó Dubhda across the river (see §V) would have been visible from the field, as it is today.

IV. Folklore of the Site: The Four Maols and the Mermaid of the Moy

Two older traditions attach themselves to Ardnaree. The first explains the name itself. The Dinnseanchus tradition, recorded by O’Donovan, tells of four foster-brothers — the Four Maols (Mael Mac Deoraidh, Maelcroin, Maeldalua and Maelseanaigh) — who murdered Bishop Ceallach of Kilmoremoy, a prince of Connacht who had renounced the kingship for the religious life. The Maols were hunted down by Ceallach’s brother Cú-Coingelt and hanged on the hill, from which it took the name Ard na Riagh. Their bodies were buried across the river at what is still known as the Dolmen of the Four Maols (the Ballina Dolmen), a Bronze Age portal tomb which predates the story by two thousand years but to which local tradition has long been attached.

The second tradition is the story of Thady Rua Ó Dubhda and the Mermaid of the Moy, preserved in the folk-tale tradition of the region. In it an Ó Dubhda chief captures a mermaid by taking her cohuleen druith (cochaillín draíochta, her magical cap); she lives with him at Ardnaree and bears him children, then finds the cap again and returns to the sea, leaving behind a prophecy that the Ó Dubhda would lose and regain the castle but only for short intervals. The Súil Uí Dhubhda proverb is sometimes drawn from this story, though it is attested independently as an idiom.

V. The Augustinian Abbey

Within sight of the castle, on the same east bank, stands the ruined Augustinian Abbey of Ardnaree, founded c. 1427 by Tadhg Riabhach Ó Dubhda, taoiseach of Tireragh, for the Augustinian Friars. A papal reference to an “Augustinian house of St Mary of Ardnaree” from 1410 suggests an earlier foundation on the site. The abbey is the only O’Dubhda-patronised medieval structure in Ballina still standing; its graveyard remained in use into the mid-20th century. A separate page on this site covers the abbey in its own right.

VI. Rediscovery, 2024

For generations after the 1829 reference, the precise location of the castle was effectively lost. Work toward its rediscovery began not with ground-penetrating radar but with a community clean-up. In 2021, a group of Ballina residents working on the Ballina Community Clean-Up project and on the commemorative artwork for the Battle of Ardnaree began to investigate an old local tale of a castle on Palmyra Castle Hill — a tale preserved, among other places, in an entry by Joseph Kilcullen in the National Folklore Schools’ Collection of 1937–39.

The Ard na Riagh Preservation Group — Martin Devaney, Dermot Rice, Colm McLoughlin (historian, Ardnaree Sarsfields GAA) and Thomas Joyce (archaeologist, MA in Landscape Archaeology) — assembled the documentary and folkloric evidence and submitted it to the National Monuments Service. On 6 June 2024, the site was added to the Historic Environment Viewer and brought under the protection of the National Monuments Acts 1930–2004. The castle stood roughly 100 m west of the present St Michael’s Church on Church Road.

The Group has described the site as “the foundation stone of Ballina” — a claim rooted in the castle’s pre-dating of both the Augustinian Abbey on its present site and the later town. That characterisation is theirs, and it is offered here as the language of the people who did the work of recovery.

Cartographic evidence. The earliest surviving documentary record that fixes the ground of the castle in writing is Sir William Petty’s 1659 Down Survey parish map of Kilmoremoy, in the barony of Tireragh — one of the set of cadastral maps drawn to record the Cromwellian forfeitures. By 1659 the O’Dubhda tower was already ruined and the Ardnaree lands had passed to Robert Morgan, but Petty’s surveyors platted the townland on the east bank of the Moy and named it on the page. The map joins a longer cartographic trail on which the family and its territory appear by name — from Ortelius (1573) and Boazio (1606) through Speed (1610) to Petty’s cadastral survey. See the Cartographic Record for the sequence in full.

VII. The 2021 Battle of Ardnaree Memorial

The 2021 memorial stands close to the battlefield, at the bend in the Moy where the east-bank camp was overrun. Two sword-shaped pillars frame a set of interpretive panels describing the clans involved — MacDonnell, Burke, Gallowglass — and the broader course of the Tudor conquest of Connacht. The central artwork depicts a murmuration of starlings attacked by hawks, a figure for the mercenary column and their attackers. The artists were Breana Rice (landscape design), Meaghan McNamara (portraiture), Kevin Loftus (the Augustinian Abbey panel) and Ciara Casey (the castle panel). The documentary The Battle of Ardnaree, by Dermot Rivel, records the project in full; a Midwest Radio interview with the Group covers the rediscovery.

VIII. What Remains Today

There are no standing remains of Ardnarea Castle. No detailed contemporary description of the tower — dimensions, plan, internal arrangement — has been located in the sources available at the time of writing. What is known is essentially negative: the castle stood on Palmyra Hill above the river, it was ruined by 1829, and the ground has since been built over and around. The Preservation Group’s identification is documentary and folkloric rather than archaeological; no excavation has yet been carried out.

This is consistent with the general caveat that applies across the O’Dubhda castle circuit. The “twenty castles” are sites of memory as often as sites of masonry — and at Ardnaree, the site of memory has been recovered but the masonry has not.

IX. Visiting

The site is on the east bank of the Moy, approximately 100 m west of St Michael’s Church on Church Road, Ballina, and a short walk from the Battle of Ardnaree memorial. Belleek Woods lies a short distance to the east. The castle ground itself is private; visitors are asked to view it externally and to respect the memorial.

Sources

• Conor Mac Hale, The Ó Dubhda Family History (1990) — the “twenty castles” list, the 1447 build date, and the O’Dubhda chronology of the site.
• John O’Donovan, Irish Proverbs (Dublin Penny Journal, 1832) and Ordnance Survey field notes — the Ard na Riagh etymology, the Four Maols tradition, and the Súil Uí Dhubhda proverb.
• Logainm.ie, Placenames Database of Ireland — townland entry “Ardnaree or Shanaghy / Ard na Ria nó Seanachaidh.”
• Annals of the Four Masters, s.a. 1586 (CELT: T100005E) — contemporary Irish account of the battle.
• Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (1950) — standard modern narrative of Bingham’s Connacht campaign.
• National Folklore Schools’ Collection, 1937–39 — Joseph Kilcullen entry, Palmyra Castle Hill.
• National Monuments Service, Historic Environment Viewer — Ardnaree Castle record, added 6 June 2024.
• Sir William Petty, Down Survey of Ireland, parish map of Kilmoremoy, barony of Tireragh (1659) — National Archives of Ireland QRO 1/1/3/18, digitised by the Down Survey of Ireland Project, Trinity College Dublin. Platted record of the townland of Ardnaree on the east bank of the Moy; cartographic anchor for the site.
• Western People, “Long-lost site of historic Ballina building is identified” (2024) — rediscovery and the Ard na Riagh Preservation Group submission.
• Dermot Rivel, The Battle of Ardnaree (documentary film) and Tommy Marren Show interview, Midwest Radio.