Roscrea Castle

The castle occupies an enclosed courtyard roughly forty metres across, defined by substantial curtain walls and a surrounding ditch. Where preserved the wall masonry reaches about 2.5 metres in thickness. Historically the defensive position was reinforced by water, with a river running to the east and a moat on the remaining sides. The present stone works replaced an earlier timber fort and reflect building campaigns from the late thirteenth century onward; much of the perimeter survives in altered or fragmentary form.

The principal residential and entrance block stands on the north side and takes the form of a tall, rectangular gate building rising three storeys. An earlier gate at the site dates to around 1280, while the existing stone gatehouse was rebuilt for the fourth Earl of Ormond during the fifteenth century and reaches an overall height of approximately twenty-seven metres. The gate block originally controlled access with a drawbridge and a portcullis. The entrance passage has a barrel-vaulted ceiling and beneath the gate is a basement prison reached by a trapdoor.

Two projecting three-quarter round towers flank the courtyard at the south-west and south-east corners. The south-west tower, known as the Ormond Tower, contains a first-floor chamber with a fireplace and a seventeenth-century plaster coat of arms. The south-east tower, often called King John’s Castle, is taller and contains three storeys. These towers were integral to the medieval defence and later accommodated domestic rooms as the castle’s role shifted.

Alterations of the seventeenth century are visible within the gate building. The second floor was laid out as a living space featuring a pointed groined vault divided into three bays, narrow lancet windows, a garderobe (a medieval privy), a chimney stack, and a large hooded fireplace with a dog-tooth style capital on the southern wall. Crow-stepped gables were added to the roofline and the mechanism for the drawbridge was operated from this floor. A winding spiral staircase in the eastern corner provides access to the upper levels. The slate roof presently covering the gate building dates to the eighteenth century, and the structure received further work in the nineteenth century.

Inside the courtyard are eighteenth-century ranges and some modern structures inserted into the enclosure. Surviving decorative work includes fragments of seventeenth-century plaster decoration, dated to the 1640s. The southern curtain wall has not survived intact. Damer House stands within the grounds as an early eighteenth-century three-storey house over a basement in the Queen Anne and Georgian manner, its façade laid out in nine bays. The interior contains one of only two staircases in the Queen Anne style recorded in the country.