Trim Castle
AND YELLOW STEEPLE TOWER.....

Trim Castle in Trim, County Meath, Ireland, on the shores of the Boyne has an area of 30,000 m². It is the remains of the largest Norman castle in Europe, and Ireland's largest castle. It was built primarily by Hugh de Lacy and his son Walter.

The main central three-story building, called a keep, donjon or great tower, is unique in its design, being of cruciform shape, with twenty corners. It was built in at least three stages, initially by Hugh de Lacy (c.1174) and then in 1196 and 1206 by Walter de Lacy. The keep was built on the site of a large ring work fortification that was burnt down in 1172 and rebuilt in 1173, following attacks by the Gaelic King of Connacht, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair Rory O'Connor.

The surviving curtain walls are predominantly of two phases. The west and north sides of the enciente are defended by rectangular towers which date to the 1170s and 1180s while the other sides with its round towers dates to the very end of the twelfth century. There were two main gates into the castle. That at the west side dates to the 1170s and sits on top of s a demolished wooden gateway. The upper stories of the stone tower were later altered to a semi octagonal shape. A single round towered gate with an external barbican tower lies in the south wall and is known as the Dublin Gate. It dates from the 1190s.

Apart from the keep the main structures surviving in the castle consist of the following: an early 14th century three towered fore work defending the keep entrance and including stables within it which is accessed by a stone causeway crossing the partly in filled ditch of the earlier ringwork; a huge early fourteenth century three aisled great hall with an under croft beneath its east end opening via a water gate to the river; a huge defensive tower turned into a solar in the early fourteenth century at the northern angle of the castle; a smaller aisled hall added to the east end of the great hall in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; a building added to the east end of the latter hall; two fifteenth or sixteenth century stone
buildings added inside the town gatehouse, 17th century buildings added to the end of the hall range and to the north side of the keep and a series of lime kilns, one dating from the late 12th century the remainder from the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

The Yellow Steeple is all that remains of the Abbey of the Blessed Virgin, which once stood on the bank of the River Boyne opposite Trim Castle. Founded sometime in the 6th century AD, the story of the Abbey serves to illustrate just how crazy violent life in Ireland was in ancient times.

In times of trouble, churches and abbeys were the refuge of last resort for the ordinary people, someplace where they trusted to the thick walls, stout doors, and the will of God when Vikings or rival tribes appeared on the horizon. However, the concept of sanctuary often didn’t account for much, especially when the barbarians didn’t believe in the same god. Every parish in the country has records of churches being burned with a couple of hundred people inside, and Trim is no different. The Boyne river is navigable from the coast as far inland as Trim, where a ford allowed easy crossings, and around which the town grew up. The Abbey of the Blessed Virgin was burned at least three times between 1108 and 1368, each time full of people. The Yellow Steeple is thought to have been built following the 1368 attack.

During this fourth rebuilding, a statue of the Blessed Virgin was erected, and it quickly acquired a reputation for working miracles. Almost two hundred years later, Archbishop Brown, Henry VIII’s first protestant Archbishop of Ireland, was writing to Thomas Cromwell complaining that this statue’s miraculous reputation was preventing the common people embracing the new religion. The statue, along with other things the reforming church now classed as idols, was removed and presumably destroyed around 1538.

The Yellow Steeple as seen from Trim Castle.

It’s uncertain exactly when the abbey buildings finally fell into ruin. Henry VIII gave the property to one of his supporters in 1542, and there are records of it changing hands again in 1617. Local custom holds that Oliver Cromwell’s men bombarded it while they were billeted in the castle, but there is little reputable documentary proof to support this. Royalist forces attempted to engage the Roundheads from within the steeple, but this seems suspect as it is generally accepted that the Trim garrison abandoned the town to join up with other Royalist forces in Meath, sparing the town a siege and a fate like Drogheda’s. |All that remains today is the broken steeple presiding over the monuments on either side of the Boyne river.

The name “Yellow Steeple” comes from the ethereal yellow/gold glow it takes on at sunrise. As you can see from the picture above, it is a majestic sight.

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