I’ve created this map showing the location of all recorded medieval fortifications across the whole of Ireland. The map is populated with a combination of National Monument Service data (Republic of Ireland) and Department for Communities data for Northern Ireland.
The data for this was pretty poor, so apologies if I’ve missed any key sites. I’ve tried to apply quite broad filters to pull in fortifications too, so ‘castles’ is not technically an accurate title. For instance, Tower Houses are not strictly castles, but I wasn’t sure of a better way to label the map – so very open to suggestions. Also the data didn't align neatly between the two Governments, hence why you'll see a lot of unclassified ones.
On the data, I find it interesting how you can see the concentration in the east versus west for Norman fortifications. This won’t be surprising to those who know their history of the Norman conquest. Beyond this, I’m not a specialist in Medieval Ireland so will have to defer to others to explain these distributions.
I previously mapped a load of other ancient monument types, the latest being barrows in Ireland.
by Sarquin
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If you’re interested in my other historical maps of Ireland, you can see them all here: [https://www.danielkirkpatrick.co.uk/historical-maps-of-ireland/](https://www.danielkirkpatrick.co.uk/historical-maps-of-ireland/)
For those who want to see the data sources check out [NMS here, ](https://www.archaeology.ie/collections-and-publications/publications/monument-class-and-scope-notes/)and the [UK Open Data here](https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/46240fa5-db15-469e-b1c8-0460504b951c/northern-ireland-sites-and-monuments-record). For the tooling, I used QGIS and PowerQuery (Excel).