Site of Castle, Mornington, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Masonry Castles

Site of Castle, Mornington, Co. Meath

The village of Colp in County Meath once boasted a castle that played its part in Ireland's tumultuous 17th century.

Historical maps from the Down Survey of 1656-8 show two houses and a tower near the church, whilst the Civil Survey records from a few years earlier tell us that John Draycott of Mornanstown and John Balfe of Colpe jointly owned 480 acres here, complete with 'a house and some cabins'. The castle itself saw action during the Confederate Wars when Lord Moore of Mellifont captured it in 1642, though remarkably it remained habitable through the 1650s.

By the time Ordnance Survey cartographers arrived in 1836, they could only mark it as the site of an old castle; its exact boundaries had already become unclear. The structure had likely been abandoned or demolished during the intervening centuries, a common fate for many Irish tower houses and castles that fell out of use after the Cromwellian conquest and subsequent changes in land ownership.

Today, nothing remains visible of the castle at Colp. The low-lying landscape shows no trace of the structure that once stood here, and even its precise location remains uncertain. Archaeological surveys conducted by Bradley and King in 1985 confirmed the absence of any visible remains, leaving only historical documents to tell the story of this lost fortification that once guarded the lands between Drogheda and Dublin.

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