Sir, - I write in response to Alison Healy's report on the archaeological excavations at Carrickmines Castle, Co Dublin (The Irish Times, June 22nd).
Mr Michael Egan of the National Roads Authority is quoted as stating that the excavation will not affect the routing of the South-Eastern Motorway. What he neglects to tell us is what effect the routing of the motorway will have on the castle, i.e., the destruction of everything the excavation has revealed.
Carrickmines Castle is of enormous historical and archaeological importance. It was one of a series of "fortalices", garrisoned forts, built to protect the English Pale and Dublin itself from the rebel Irish of the Leinster mountains. These were a unique response to the political and military conditions of the late 13th century which threatened the very survival of the medieval lordship of Ireland. Carrickmines is the only one that has ever been excavated.
None of this is news. Part of the castle complex has always been visible above ground; there is evidence aplenty of its existence in historical records; and it has for many years been included in Dúchas's own Sites and Monuments Record for Co Dublin. Anyone planning to build a motorway should have known that it was a location to be avoided at all costs.
What has emerged from the dig is that the Carrickmines fortalice was a massive earthwork, revetted in stone, parts of which still survive up to 3.5 metres in height. It was protected by a series of enclosing ditches, the main ditch having been quarried into the very bedrock. It was, and is still, a formidable sight.
Whatever the explanation for the failure to recognise the site's significance before the Carrickmines excavation, no one seeing it today could be in any doubt. It is imperative that Dúchas ("the Heritage Service") and the NRA think again and find an engineering solution to an engineering problem.
After all, it was not the builders of Carrickmines Castle who got their location wrong. It was the NRA. - Yours, etc.,
SEÁN DUFFY FTCD,
Chairman,
Friends of Medieval Dublin,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.