The Society’s Heritage Week outing this year took place at the very end of an event-filled week, but this did not deter an enthusiastic group of eighty participants who were guided around the principle monuments of Medieval Castledermot by local archaeologist, Sharon Greene. The tour began in the graveyard of St James’ Church, which is the location of the original early Christian foundation of Díseart Diarmada and home to an impressive round tower, two high crosses (and the base of a third), the burial place of a King of Munster and Ireland’s only example of a Viking hogback burial stone.
The group then moved to the ruins of the Franciscan Friary located at the southern end of the town, originally just outside the medieval town walls, where the development of the town from an early monastic settlement to Norman manor and eventually to fortified town was explained as well as the effects of the Bruce invasion and the Black Death. Within the friary is the only example in county Kildare of a medieval cadaver effigy.
The group then travelled on to Carlowgate, the only remaining upstanding portion of the medieval town wall which was completed in 1302, and heard about the significance of medieval Tristledermot as a location for councils, courts and parliaments, including the first meeting to be described as a parliament in Ireland or Britain in June 1264. Finally the tour finished up in the square in the middle of the town where the decline of the town was covered in discussion of the Geraldine rebellion, the dissolution of the monasteries and Cromwellian attack. In all it was a successful outing with the rare absence of either or wind or rain!
Text: Sharon Greene
Photos: AJ Mullowney and Padraig Dooley
