Before Aughinish Alumina transformed the landscape into an industrial complex, excavators revealed the foundations of a substantial bawn wall, 2.2 metres thick, that once enclosed a roughly circular defensive area measuring about 80 metres north to south and 60 metres east to west. The southern entrance, paved with well-laid cobbles and spanning 3.5 metres wide, would have been the main gateway into this fortified compound.

Though legal complications prevented the team from investigating the keep itself, their excavations within the bawn walls yielded fascinating glimpses into centuries of occupation. They discovered the base of a domed oven, suggesting bread-making and daily life within the castle walls, alongside sherds of late and post-medieval pottery and various iron implements. An Irish halfpenny from the late 17th century helped date the site’s later phases of use. The artefacts paint a picture of a working castle, inhabited through turbulent times in Irish history.

Perhaps the most poignant discovery came in the form of 31 skeletons, the majority being young children and babies. This haunting find points to the presence of a cillín, or killeen; a burial ground for unbaptised infants who, according to Catholic doctrine of the time, couldn’t be interred in consecrated ground. These informal graveyards, often tucked into the corners of abandoned medieval sites across Ireland, serve as sobering reminders of the harsh realities of infant mortality and religious strictures in centuries past. Today, this complex history lies buried beneath the industrial infrastructure of modern Limerick, preserved only in archaeological records and memory.