Inside Ireland’s Best Medieval Castle

This is a series about castles and how they help tell the story of a place full of history. Ireland. These are the powerhouses that dot this emerald isle, from green hills to rugged coastlines. I'm exploring four magnificent monuments that lie at the heart of Ireland's story, from ancient high points to Norman keeps and medieval citadels. In this first episode, I'm going all the way back to the beginning, to the place where high kings of Ireland projected their power. This is the hill of Tara, a place steeped in the myths and legends of Ireland. I'll discover how things changed dramatically when the Normans arrived, exploring a fascinating document that influenced the view of Ireland for hundreds of years. This is something absolutely extraordinary. It is a copy of the single most controversial work written about Ireland by anyone, ever, anywhere. And getting hands-on to investigate these structures full of stories. These are the castles of Ireland. The hill of Tara is located near Screen in County Meath, Ireland, an hour's drive north from the capital Dublin. In Irish, it's known as Teimhear, or Cnachna Teimheach. The hill of Tara was an ancient site for celebrating spiritual and political power. There's Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age evidence of communities gathering here. This place has been a meeting point for over a millennium. Almost 150 high kings of Ireland were crowned on this spot, using this, the Lear Fall, Ireland's Stone of Destiny. Mystery swirls around this piece of stone. It's claimed, for instance, that the real Stone of Destiny was taken to Scotland at one point and became the Stone of Scoon. There's also another legend that if the true king of Ireland puts his foot to this stone, it will scream out with joy. Let's see what happens. Nothing. Not me, then, I'm afraid. Although it's surrounded by ditches and earthworks, Tara is too small to be a fortress. It's more a place to symbolise power, and it's certainly attracted plenty of legends. There's even a rumour that the hill of Tara was the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. And in 1899, a group excavated the site to try to find it. They were unsuccessful and caused a lot of unrest trying. Protests from famous 19th century Irish writers like W.B. Yeats and Arthur Griffiths stopped their search. Historian Margaret Brady is my guide to this intriguing place. The Irish for Tara is teáir, meaning set apart, and the Greek meaning for Tara is sacred space. So if you put those two things together, you've got the essence, I suppose, of what the hill of Tara is. And it's this domain where the gods and the goddesses sit alongside mortal kings. Kingship is this fine line of keeping the gods and the goddesses appeased and keeping the people happy. And the justice of the ruler, fair fleham, is this code of ethics that kings ruled by. So you had to be truthful and just and peaceful, fertile and physically perfect. But if you lived by that, plus all these list of taboos and things that they weren't allowed to do, then that meant that the sun shone and the grass grew and the crops were successful and the people were happy. And to be king of Tara gave you a higher status than anywhere else in the country. In the early 11th century, Ireland was split into five provinces. Ulster, Connacht, Leinster, Meath and Munster, each ruled by a separate king. Power would ebb and flow between them until one king united them more than any other, Brian Boru. Boru was an Irish king who ruled over his home province of Munster and then took over Leinster. In 1002, he came to Tara and battled and won against the king of Tara, meaning he was now king of three of the five provinces and became emperor of Ireland. In April 1013, Boru was killed in the aftermath of the Battle of Clontarf, a battle fought against a group of Viking Irish rebels north of Dublin. Although Boru's side won, the losing side on their way home found an elderly Brian in his tent and killed him. But his reputation as an Irish hero endured thanks to this victory. He was the penultimate High King of Ireland and is remembered as one of the first people who began to unify Irish kingship. But it's not just Boru who's kept Tara in the history books. Another man holds spiritual significance here. He unified Ireland not by power and politics but by faith. This was a man who is integral to the establishment of Christianity here and remains a symbol of Ireland across the world. He came here over 500 years before Brian Boru in the 5th century. He is Saint Patrick. How does the role of Tara change when Christianity comes in and those pagan gods begin to be pushed aside? We embrace Christianity very quickly as a country. Saint Patrick arrives to Ireland having previously been here as a slave. He was taken by Irish raiders. It's thought somewhere along the Welsh coast from his home as a younger boy and he was brought to Ireland for a number of years where he tended animals on a mountainside. It's thought to have been Sleafmish and he escapes, makes his way back home. Saint Patrick then returns to Ireland. He knew the significance of Tara and lights a fire at a hill close to here to begin a fight against the Druid King Leora. Patrick is taken prisoner and faces the Druids. He performs a variety of miracles and in the end defeats the Druids, telling them that as he is won they must accept his Christian faith. So Patrick is very aware of the power of Tara and the need to get here to influence Ireland if he wants to convert it to Christianity. If anything he was probably ahead of his time because he knows that Tara is the centre of the world. We always think of Saint Patrick as driving the snakes from Ireland. The reality was probably that the snakes were the non-believers. Patrick succeeds because he sells Christianity to people in a way that they can believe. He uses the Shamrock for the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. He takes some of the pagan ways, he blends them into Christianity so people can buy into this. Tara represents the nexus, the focal point of both political and spiritual power in Ireland. So this is where he needs to get to to deliver his messages. The hill of Tara is a place of history and a place of power. Somewhere connected to thousands of years of ancestors, a place where high kings of Ireland would come for its political and spiritual importance. From here you can see 20% of the entire landmass of Ireland. It really is a focal point and that's why Patrick would come here in his efforts to introduce Christianity to Ireland. He knew that this was the place to do it. This was not just the political but also the spiritual hub of Ireland. And even as the political importance of Tara began to wane, it's still a place that people remained connected to. It's always had an important story to tell at the heart of Ireland and even today people will come here still hoping to connect to that past. The structures here at Tara show its importance since the prehistoric age. Although in the later medieval period, Tara would no longer be the seat of kingship in Ireland. In 1167 the King of Leinster was deposed by the High King of Ireland. The King of Leinster fled to Wales determined to regain his position. He turned for assistance to the Normans. His request is recorded in the In the presence of the barons of your empire, your liege man I shall become henceforth all the days of my life on condition you be my helper so that I do not lose at all. You I shall acknowledge as sire and lord. Then the King promised him the powerful King of England that willingly would he help him as soon as he should be able. This would begin a process of colonization of Ireland that would change Irish history forever. On the 1st of May 1167 the Normans invaded. Unlike their invasion of England in 1066, in Ireland the Normans had to play a different game. Ireland wasn't as malleable as the Anglo-Saxon lordships had been. So instead of a one-day battle with a couple of months of an aggressive takeover, this hostile land would need a few years and even then some areas were still off limits. From 1167 to 1171 the Normans sailed across and viciously battled and won against many of the kings of Ireland. After their wins they tried to play some of the same tricks they'd done in England to assimilate, mixing their traditions with the Irish and marrying their children to the high king's offspring. But this wasn't the only thing familiar about their invasion. With them came these castles. Castles spread across Ireland, first as wooden keeps before being cemented in the stone we still see today. One of the most spectacular is here at Trim in County Meath. It's nestled on the south bank of the River Boyne, about 25 miles from the Irish Sea. This gigantic 30,000 meter square building sits on a bed of limestone. It took 30 years to build and is the largest keep in all of Ireland. This is the very top of Trim Castle's keep. It's amazing to stand on this spot where for 800 years people have surveyed this countryside. You can see for miles in every direction, but for anyone who lived within sight of this imposing structure it would have been a constant visible reminder of a new power that was intruding into their lives. Trim, like many Norman castles, has a monumental central keep. Analysis of the wall timber shows that the keep's main building phases happened in 1175, in the 1190s and in the early 13th century. The original wooden keep, an earthwork fort, was burnt to the ground by Irish rebels in 1173. But three years later these Norman overlords decided enough was enough. It was time to build a big hulking stone keep to manage these troublesome Irish. They quarried limestone and sandstone to create a stone keep, a curtain wall and gatehouse. All added along with two moats in 1176. This keep is three stories high and shaped like a cross. Unlike any other keep it has 20 right-angled corners. It's likely the holes on the top floor would have been where a wooden walkway was placed, which would have given extra defensive spots to attack any advancing invader. The curtain wall itself would have been 450 meters long. The ground level of the outer area of the wall would have been much higher than now, standing at eight meters tall and two meters thick. This would have been where they quarried the stone to build the curtain wall. It has a two-story gatehouse, built around the year 1200, that would have been guarded by a bridge and the outer moat. Like many Norman castles it has an outer and an inner bailey. It's clear this place was designed to be utterly impregnable and an imposing symbol of the new English domination of Ireland. To trade all the days from this day to that. Mel Gibson's Braveheart follows the story of William Wallace as he revolts against English rule in Scotland. Trim's outer walls were used by the producers as the besieged city of York. We can get you out if you leave now. I'm not about to tell my uncle I've lost him the greatest city in northern England. And the interior of the keep was used as the Tower of London, where Wallace was executed. It's intriguing the producers chose to use such a defiant bastion of English power in a film focusing on the impact of a man whose goal was to free Scotland from English rule. The film also used this highly fortified Barbican gate that stands on the south side of the castle. This is the Dublin gate which is a fantastic example of a Barbican. A Barbican is any covered entranceway into a building and the Barbican here was added after the swamp area outside the castle was drained. It would have had a drawbridge that came over the moat and then this series of gates to get through all of which would have been protected and it has these mural passages on either side that allow access to arrow loops which means anytime you were attacking this castle trying to get past each stage of those defences you're being overlooked by archers who are peppering you relentlessly with arrows. If you did get past the Barbican gate and into the inner bailey you'd be attacked from the heart of the castle, the keep. But throughout the early medieval period the keep wasn't just used for defence, it was also a home. In its earliest years Trim's keep was required to perform many duties. The cruciform design meant that stairwells could be hidden at either side creating these immense spaces in between. Across several levels this part of the keep would have been all about business, allowing the lord to take care of everything he needed to do to run Trim. But as we move through we get into slightly different quarters. This would have been the more private part of the keep. We can tell things are a bit different here from the much larger windows at this level and the gigantic fireplace that would have been roaring to keep them warm. I can just imagine this space hung with tapestries, panelled with wood, the finest furnishings everywhere as the lord relaxes after a day's work. Across several levels they would have had very comfortable lodgings in here. The keep was the centre of society at the castle. It wasn't just a defensive space and a home, it was also the administrative capital of the area. This was where an English overlord controlled a majority Irish population through an imported English regime. The lord would have had several functions going on within this building. A chancery would be his writing office where he's writing letters and writs. He would have had an exchequer to count the money that was coming in from the locality and he would have had a treasury where he needed to store everything that was precious to him. That's why keeps are built with such thick walls to be so defensible. It's also important to remember that at Trim it's an Anglo-Irish lord in this building but he's trying to command an Irish population, so them coming here to deliver their money would have been really intimidating for them. Hugh de Lacey inherited the English de Lacey lands taken after 1066. He was a Norman landowner who controlled huge swathes of Shropshire and Herefordshire. As the second son he was initially the spare but became the heir after his elder brother died. He was known to push the boundaries in social situations as well as local land grabs. Maybe his harsh reputation was built on trying to prove he was worthy of his inheritance. But by the 1170s his land on the Welsh marches was now fairly secure so Hugh readied himself for a new challenge. The reward? Even more land. He'd already seen other marcher lords take ownership of areas of Ireland and now he wanted his piece. He joined King Henry II on his 1171 expedition to Ireland battling in Dublin, Waterford and Wexford. It's here perhaps throughout these battles that Hugh slipped up the greasy pole to be given control over the largest lordship in Ireland, Meath. Meath covered 800,000 acres of valuable agricultural land from the modern counties of Louth to Offaly, including the city of Dublin. But he chose Trim as his main base and to investigate why I'm meeting historian Jimmy Gaffney. Why does Hugh de Lacey pick this particular spot to build the magnificent Trim Castle? This one here was chosen on the south bank of the River Boyne. It was not just a central position as well but it already had been an ecclesiastical site before that. Obviously the river offered an excellent barrier to the north and then you had a kind of a swampy area to the south as well. Does the town of Trim then spring up around the castle? It was a small settlement but essentially yes the modern or urban area of Trim did actually develop along the castle and of course by the later 13th century it was walled as well. And would walling the town then have been something like an English plantation effectively in Ireland somewhere they could protect from the Irish? I mean this was a frontier town so yes it was like kind of an English bastion it was at the frontier of what became known as the Pale. Trim doesn't just have a wall around its castle. Its town was completely walled in although this wall no longer remains but we can imagine this castle would have felt like a very safe spot for the English lordship to bed in. Trim's walled town was built in the late 13th century and it originally encompassed 56 acres of land and was built using extra taxes imposed by the new English overlords. There were five gateways, only one now remains, the Sheep Gate. This provided access from the town to the now ruined St Mary's Abbey. From these gates you could control exactly who came in and out and even trap people into paying tolls and taxes to enter or to leave. These provinces were run by a few Normans controlling the many frontier towns and castles like these using similar tactics throughout their newly growing Irish empire. Trim would have been a vital stronghold in an area of Ireland known as the Pale. The Pale was controlled by the Normans. Beyond the Pale is where there was no royal authority. It was a place the Normans saw as full of barbarians and lawlessness. But here in Trim, things were very much in order. No lawlessness to be seen here. So much so, someone even wrote a poem about this magnificent castle. It tells us that Hugh de Lacey fortified a house at Trim and dug a ditch around it and enclosed it within a stockade. Within the house he then placed great knights and barons. That house is what we see today of Trim Castle. But it's not just Hugh's house that we have a description of. One of his contemporaries, Gerald of Wales, left us a wonderful physical description of precisely what Hugh de Lacey looked like. He says Hugh was a swarthy man with small deep-set black eyes, a flat nose, an ugly scar on his right cheek caused by a burn, a short neck and a hairy sinewy body. He was short and ill-made in person. Although extremely well-versed in the business of war, he often suffered heavy losses on his expeditions. After the death of his wife he was a womaniser and enslaved by lust, not just for one woman but for many. He was avaricious and greedy for gold and more ambitious for his own advancement and preeminence than was proper. Why would Gerald, a fellow Anglo-Norman, be writing about Hugh de Lacey in this way? It suggests that the Norman invasion of Ireland was far more complex than it may have seemed on the surface. Gerald of Wales was recorded as a troublesome archdeacon. He offers a foreigner's view of Ireland and it was almost universally negative. Gerald was born in 1147 and was a Welsh-Norman writer who extensively travelled across Norman-controlled Europe and beyond. His influential book, the Topographia Hibernica, the Topography of Ireland, is often cited as one of the first pieces of colonial propaganda. He praised himself, his friends and his beloved Wales and, although extremely problematic, he's one of the only Norman sources for Ireland that we have from this period. It's an anti-Irish document which shaped how people see Ireland and the Irish people for centuries. It's held at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. We've been given special access with historian Dermot Scully. This is something absolutely extraordinary. It is a copy of the single most controversial work written about Ireland by anyone ever anywhere. Why does Gerald write this and why is it controversial? He wanted fame. He wanted to be known as a great writer. He dedicates the topography to Henry II of England and Gerald's family, the Geraldines, great marcher lords of Wales, were instrumental in the early stages of the English conquest of Ireland. So this is a political aim to this which is the advancement and justification of what Gerald would call the English conquest of Ireland. So that's why we have some less than friendly terms that he uses for the people of Ireland throughout this work? Well Gerald is a very disputatious man. I would say he certainly feels culturally superior to the Irish. He is presenting the English conquest as a which would put him very much in the 12th century Anglo-Roman perspective on the conquest. So what kind of thing does Gerald say about the Irish? I mean I'm noticing in the margin here there's a great big long finger pointing. Are we supposed to notice this? The person who put that in has noticed something very powerful and playful. So what we're looking at here is where Gerald, he's divided this text into three parts and the third part is a description of the people of Ireland and he has described in the preceding pages the settlement of Ireland and he now moves on to tell us what kind of people they are. And this hand is drawing our attention to a really powerful sentence where Gerald says about the people that they are in Gens Silvestris. They are at Silvan, a woodland, a forest people and also he uses the word inhospitable right here afterwards. Gens is inhospita. He is immensely learned in the classical sources and the reference to the Irish as an inhospitable people is taken from Silvanus writing in around the year I think 200 and Silvanus presents Ireland as a remote place at the ends of the earth, warlike people who are morally vicious and cruel. The image of Ireland that Gerald paints is of a wild land full of bestial people who are uncivilized and immoral. The Irish are a rude people subsisting on the produce of their cattle only and living themselves like beasts, a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life. This people then is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner. All their habits are barbarisms. It had a profound long-lasting influence justifying subjugation and invasion of Ireland for centuries. The legacy is that he shaped the way people all over Europe thought about Ireland for hundreds of years. So what Gerald has done has been to establish an idea of utter moral degradation, weirdness and barbarism at the ends of the earth. So Irish scholars are desperate to overturn this because in the Tudor period, it's not a, for example, it's not a coincidence that in Holinshed's chronicles a commission was given for the into English. So many of the Tudor accounts and later accounts of Irish barbarism ultimately depend on Gerald. So in the 16th century when the Tudors are again looking at a sort of conquest in Ireland they're still relying on Gerald's justification for that. They are. They see this conquest or some of them would present it also as a way of reforming these Irish people and what you're seeing on this page is one of the stories that caused immense offence in Ireland. So what he claims in this story is that in this part of Ulster there is a particular inauguration ritual for kings. So the king, he says, has ritual sexual intercourse with a white horse which is then killed. So you see the killing of the horse and the Irishman, long beard and hair. Gerald says the Irish are literally barbarous. But it's an absolutely incredible justification for an invasion, a sort of sense of a justification for colonialism almost that would endure way beyond Gerald and what he meant by this. It is because anybody interested in, I would think, in the literature of wider colonialism into the modern period, the template you see being developed here and so this is, sometimes I've seen it referred to as he's copying Roman ideas but he's doing far more than this because he's writing much later than the Romans in a Christian context. So the idea, I mean what is absolutely new about this is this is one of the first times that a Christian European people have been redefined as barbarians because until this period Christian and civilised went together. So Gerald is doing something quite extraordinary. What he's doing is subverting a very ancient idea of the land of saints and scholars and setting up a whole way of thinking that has absolutely shaped and endured for centuries and centuries. It's not gone away. Diarmuid's painted a really colourful picture for us of Gerald of Wales and his view of Ireland, the way in which he describes the people here as barbarians who need to be civilised. The land is beautiful but it needs to be harnessed and that's what the Anglo-Normans are coming to do. But what did the Normans bring with them to suppress these so-called barbarians? Archaeologist Dave Swift has studied the weapons of the Norman era. So if the Normans actually ended up getting up close to the Irish, what kind of weapons might they be using then? Both sides would have relied on the spear. We think in Ireland by the way that the spear is a very specialised weapon. There's up to 25 different terms for what we call a spear or a javelin in the Irish Gaelic language. The knight's weapons would have included a lance which is essentially a long spear. But what really makes the Norman knight impervious is his armour. The Norman knight would have been encased in mail and the mail may have weighed between 10 maybe 15 kilos altogether. These Norman knights, maybe the one percent, maybe the two percent, they are covered in mail from head to toe. One of the most familiar pieces of armour we associate with the Normans is their helmet. The helmet might weigh between one and two kilos itself. This one's one of the earlier ones that you may be familiar with from the Bayeux tapestry era. It's a really recognisable Norman helmet isn't it? Absolutely. So perhaps you'd be willing to give it a try I mean that is comfortable. It's a good design yeah. And I can see this is protecting my nose. And you still have reasonably good vision. Yeah it's not restricting my field of vision. And it's rounded to deflect blows. Yeah. And it's blackened to retard roast. I mean there's a lot of thought that goes into these pieces. But again you know simple thing but does a great job of protecting the most vulnerable part of your body I guess. Another way to protect your head was a full head helmet. But they weren't always the best choice. So this one here is what we see later on from around 1200 onwards. So not the best design ever. Yeah so that looks like it's lost a lot of the advantages of that helmet in that it's not curved. It's not really deflecting blows. There's lots of flat surfaces and angles on there. Yeah. But it's protecting much more of your face. Of your visage yeah absolutely. It's also quite likely that a lot of these helmets, these transitional helmets as known before the great helmet fully develops, also had a small you know skull or an underlaying cap of steel underneath them as well. I'm feeling really weird nodding at you inside this one. Yeah. But that also does restrict your field of vision. It does more than that. Quite a lot. And obviously these are to help you breathe I guess. Breathing holes yeah. Effectively got a lump of metal right in your face when you're trying to fight and run around. What about the Irish defenders fighting back against these formidable warriors? And so when the Normans arrive this looks like a lot of it would have been a shock to the Irish to be faced with forces who were arriving with all of this. What kind of weapons would the Irish have had to defend themselves? I'm sure as an Englishman you'll appreciate what's sometimes called the Dane Axe, more properly known as the Breed Axe, the Broad Axe. So the Irish weren't really axe fighters prior to the Viking Age. But they took on the axe quite readily. These weapons are not designed for wood chopping. They usually have a very thin blade and again you have a hammer welded steel edge added on to the iron head of the axe. Razor sharp, very thin, very quick, very nimble weapon to use. Not as defensive of course. It does take two hands to use so you're not using a shield at the same time. But devastating as an offensive weapon. And what kind of armour might the Irish have been wearing? We don't think the Irish had a lot of armour. Armour is probably more or less non-existent but I think shields would have been fairly common. But we have even less information about what type of shields that the Irish are using. A lot of the Irish warriors are using spears, javelins, that type of thing. Iconography in this period is very limited especially when it comes to the natives and the written sources are also very scanty as well. The Normans used their military might to expand across Ireland, planting their stone bastions of to dominate the divided Irish clans. In a few centuries Ireland had gone from localised clan rule, a rural community with shifting alliances, to a land of castles, lords and feudalism. The majority of Irish people were now living under the rule of a minority of Norman leaders like Hugh de Lacey. We know about people like Hugh de Lacey who commanded his castle to be built here at Trim, but what about the normal people in this period? The people who lived and worked here, who weren't born into high society. This castle needed plenty of people to keep it running smoothly but their names have been lost or destroyed in the complexities of Irish history over the last 900 years. Historian John Marshall can tell us why. Castles like this are always connected to big families, big names, famous people. Do we get many stories of the ordinary people who who lived in the castle, worked around the castle? Unfortunately we don't tend to get that sort of rich minute detail and it's primarily due to the kind of level of records we have left. So I suppose Trim, you know, any records that are being kept in Trim Castle is changing hands quite a bit. It's embroiled in a number of kind of baronial conflicts, but also then when Oliver Cromwell comes to Ireland he occupies Trim and its surrounding area, the Garrison Flea Trim Castle. And then I suppose most detrimentally, in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, kind of all of the colonial records of the English administration are destroyed and so kind of with that this vast amount of documentation is gone. But we do know that Trim would have been doing quite well, would have been a thriving town and there would have been rich trade that's engaging in kind of maritime commerce. Throughout the medieval period Trim was a centre of Irish Anglo-Norman defensive frontier rule, a stronghold against those viewed as barbarians. The Norman invasion of Ireland attracted hard men like Hugh de Lacey with the promise of easy rewards. Gerald of Wales talks about a need to civilise Ireland, but also describes the right way to go about it and men like Hugh didn't fit with Gerald's ideal template. Perhaps though he had to be that kind of brutal man to have the success that Hugh did. After all he planted a castle here that remains 800 years later. Trim's keep rising out of the countryside was a sign that the Normans were here. Its transformation into a comfortable palatial residence was the signal that they weren't going anywhere. The Norman invasion changed Irish history forever. They brought the English language, the common law, new Norman surnames, division of fields, of counties and of course they bought castles, all of which still remain in Ireland today. But back in the medieval period it wasn't just the Normans who were eyeing up this fertile emerald isle. A new enemy was coming from across the water, the Scots.