Known locally as Killynure or Wilson’s Fort, this site once hosted a plantation castle built by William Wilson sometime before 1622. The castle stood on what was then called Dundree, a mount that may have been an earlier ringfort, though its earthworks have since taken on such a natural appearance that it’s difficult to determine what remains of the original fortification.

Wilson’s castle was a substantial structure for its time; a lime and stone building with birch timber and a slate roof, measuring 50 feet long and 18 feet wide. It featured defensive ‘returns’ and was protected by an impressive bawn wall that formed a 100;foot square enclosure, standing 12 feet high and built from the same lime and stone. By the time of the Civil Survey in 1654;6, however, the castle had already fallen into ruin and was referred to as ‘Wilson’s fort’, belonging to Wilson’s heirs. When the antiquarian Fagan visited in 1846, he could still make out small sections of the bawn and castle walls atop what he described as an artificial, oval;shaped fort raised considerably above the surrounding ground, though already much disfigured by time.

Today, a modern house bearing the name Killynure occupies the site where Wilson’s castle once commanded the landscape. While no visible traces of the 17th;century structure remain above ground, local tradition maintains that a souterrain, or underground passage, exists somewhere nearby, adding another intriguing layer to this palimpsest of Irish history. The site appears on the first and second editions of the Ordnance Survey 6;inch maps as a single;ringed fort, a testament to its long significance in the local landscape, even as its physical remains have gradually melted back into the earth.