Grangemore Castle

An Ghráinseach Mhór — the great grange: a small monastic tower beside an ancient graveyard in Templeboy parish, Co. Sligo

On low ground in the civil parish of Templeboy, in the barony of Tireragh, a small ivy-clad tower stands beside an old graveyard. This is Grangemore — in Irish An Ghráinseach Mhór, “the great grange.” The name declares what the site was: a monastic farm, worked as an outlying possession of one of the religious houses of medieval Sligo. The tower that survives here was not the seat of a Gaelic lord but a refuge used by the monks and friars who held the grange — “the remains of a small castle,” the Schools’ Collection of 1937‐9 records, “which was used by them is still standing.”

Conor Mac Hale’s 1990 history of the family notes Grangemore among the castles of Tireragh, while recording that it “did not belong to the O’Dubhda family”; it sits on the Ó Dubhda castle tour as a grange inside the territory. It is the only site on that tour whose character is ecclesiastical rather than secular — a grange inside Ó Dubhda territory, not an Ó Dubhda stronghold. The graveyard alongside is still in use and is directly accessible from the public road.

I. The Name

The townland is recorded on logainm.ie (ID 44937) as An Ghráinseach Mhór — “the great grange.” The word gráinseach is borrowed from monastic Latin grangia and refers specifically to an outlying farm held and worked by a religious house. The place-name itself is therefore the first and clearest piece of evidence for what Grangemore was.

The Elizabethan Fiants of 1584 record “Great Graunge and Little Graunge in Tipheraghe,” distinguishing a larger grange from a smaller one in the same barony. Variant forms follow from 1577 onwards — Graunge, Graingemore, Grange more. John O’Donovan, writing the Ordnance Survey Name Books for Co. Sligo in 1836, gave the Irish form directly: “Grainseach mór, ‘great grange.’” The same Name Books describe the townland in 1836 as containing “a fort and a corn mill,” with “a considerable stream [running] north through its centre.” What the 1836 compilers called a “fort” is most likely the small tower whose ruin still stands above that stream today.

II. The Graveyard and the Monks’ Refuge

The fullest surviving evidence for the site’s character comes not from printed histories but from the Bailíuchán na Scol (Schools’ Collection) of 1937–9, in which primary-school teachers in Sligo gathered local tradition from their pupils. Templeboy’s schools contributed several entries on Grangemore; taken together they give a consistent picture of a monastic site with a small fortified tower and an old graveyard still in use:

• “Monks live at Grangemore and they had an old castle there.” (CBÉS vol. 168, p. 294)
• A monastery flourished for centuries near Ardkill, where the monks stored grain in a granary and kept “the old castle of Grangemore,” in which friars lived and said mass before the priest-hunters drove them into hiding. (CBÉS vol. 168, p. 26)
• Twenty yards from the old Castle, in Higgins’ field, a plain flat stone marks the grave of a monk; a cross is carved upon it. (CBÉS vol. 168, p. 48)
• The castle survives beside the old graveyard: “the remains of a small castle which was used by them is still standing” ‐ described as “a very impregnable fortress for that period.” (CBÉS vol. 169, p. 138)
• Two graveyards were in use in the parish, at Grange More and at Corkhill; one account calls them the upper and the lower, and names the lower one Templeboy. Only Catholics were buried in Templeboy graveyard; when a Protestant burial was attempted, local tradition held, the coffin kept rising from the earth. (CBÉS vol. 167, p. 756; vol. 169, p. 139)

The oldest dated tombstone the Schools’ Collection records in the parish is that of William Knoy, died 18 April 1780 ‐ a plain flat slab resting on four supporting stones ‐ but it stands in the neighbouring Corkhill graveyard (CBÉS vol. 167, p. 756). Of Grangemore itself the same account says only that its tombs are “so old as one cannot read them to know to whom they belong” (CBÉS vol. 167, p. 757).

III. Place in the Ó Dubhda Territory

Grangemore lies well within the historical lordship of Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe, and Conor Mac Hale, in his Ó Dubhda Family History (1990), notes it among the castles of the territory while recording that it did not belong to the Ó Dubhda family. That association is the basis on which Grangemore appears on this site’s castle tour today.

No primary source we have been able to consult, however, records Grangemore as the seat of an Ó Dubhda chief. The townland does carry a family name in the old records. Duald Mac Firbis’s seventeenth-century account of the families of Tír Fhiachrach, and the topographical poem written in 1417 by Giolla Íosa Mór Mac Firbis, both place the O’Colman family at Grainseach Mór, holding land under the Ó Dubhda: “O’Colman has a brave share obtained, Grainseach Mor, the seat of Patrick” (O’Donovan 1844, pp. 170‐171, 262‐263). The record does not say whether the O’Colmans had any part in the tower that stands today. The surviving local memory, gathered a century ago from Templeboy’s own schoolchildren, is unanimous: the tower was a monks’ refuge.

That picture is consistent with the place-name itself. Many Irish monastic houses held outlying granges protected by small fortified towers, particularly during the unsettled years of the Reformation, the suppression of the religious houses under Henry VIII, and the penal era that followed. Whether the Grangemore grange was originally attached to the Augustinians of Ballysadare, the Dominicans at Rathfran, or another house within reach of Templeboy is not established by the sources we have to hand.

IV. The Site Today

What survives at Grangemore is a small late-medieval stone tower, heavily overgrown, standing in open farmland a short distance from the public road. Ivy masses over the east face; a mature tree has grown hard against the west wall. The structure has not been the subject of a detailed published archaeological survey, and no secure construction date can be given from the present evidence.

The adjoining graveyard is still in use and is directly accessible from the street, enclosed by a dry-stone wall and entered through a simple gate from the roadside — no permission or interpretation is required to walk among the headstones. At the entrance a modern guide to the legible surnames and their locations has been erected for visitors.

The tower itself stands in a working farm field a little away from the graveyard, and should be viewed from the public roadway unless the landowner’s permission has been sought and given. The ground is uneven and the ivy-covered walls should not be leant against.