Rectified photographs of Glosh Tower, County Mayo.

DIG, DRAW AND DIGITISE. GUARD HOUSES OF COUNTY MAYO

Posted by Past Horizons on Saturday, April 23, 2011 Comments (4)

By Stuart Rathbone

any people living around the west coast of Ireland today may well feel that the

internet revolution is slowly passing them by. Forced into using dubiously titled mobile broadband services, an unusual part of the daily routine is checking the weather forecast to see how strong the internet signal is likely to be for the next day. It may come as a surprise, then, to find that for a brief period 200 years ago Ireland was at the cutting edge of communication technology after 81 semaphore stations were installed along its remote Atlantic coast. The use of such semaphore lines only began in the mid 1790s in France, and was highly-advanced for the period.
The semaphore stations were commissioned in 1803 and ran from Dublin around the south coast, the west coast and terminated at the most northerly point in Ireland, Malin Head. They consisted of a large mast with a series of flags and balls used to convey messages by placing the different elements in different positions. Unless a suitable building was already present in the selected location, a defended guard house in the form of a small square tower was constructed to house the small garrison. The coastal defences of Ireland were established in the 16 century and continued sporadically throughout the 17 century but were fairly neglected throughout much of the 18 century. However, the increased threat of invasion by French forces led to a major period of redevelopment during the final part of the 18 century and the early part of the 19 century. This endeavour received additional motivation after the French attempt to land around 17,000 troops in Bantry Bay in 1796, and the ill-fated invasion of 1798 when 1000 troops landed at Killala and a further 8000 were intercepted at sea en route to Lough Swilly.
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Garinish martello tower, Glengariff, County Cork - Photo: Joachim S. Mller, Flickr

Early warning system

In response, the sites of potential landing places for a major invading fleet were assessed and only six locations were identified: Lough Swilly, Galway Bay, the Shannon Estuary, Bantry Bay, Cork Harbour and Waterford, all well away from the more secure eastern coast.[i] A building programme rapidly began which involved refurbishing and improving existing fortifications, and constructing new artillery batteries and fortifications, including the famous Martello towers. A lesser known part of the improved defences were the 81 semaphore stations. This system was established at the request of the Lord Lieutenant Hardwick who sought an early warning system to allow for the rapid redeployment of troops in response to another invasion. A chain of signal stations was also built across the middle of the country, running from Dublin to Galway and Cork via Athlone.[ii] The Martello towers of this period have become somewhat iconic features around the coast, with many of them still in use for a variety of nonmilitary purposes or left as ruins incorporated into public parks. However the guard towers that accompanied the semaphore masts have been rather forgotten and the sites are most often in a terrible state of disrepair. Even within the archaeological community these sites have generally been neglected. They are not listed in the Register of Monuments and Places, and only a single article reviews them in any depth, although brief accounts of individual sites have been published such as those describing the towers on Clare Island and the Arran Islands.[iii]

The location of the signal towers in County Mayo.

Signal towers in County Mayo

Eight signal towers were built within the current boundaries of County Mayo. These are located from south to north on Inish Turk, Clare Island, Achill Island, Glosh on Belmullet, Tower Hill on Belmullet, Benwee Head, Glinsk and Creevagh. In 2010 Achill field school initiated a small research project to study and record these eight sites, one of which is located just a few kilometres from the school. Using a variety of survey techniques, including GPS survey, EDM survey and rectified photography, the field school is preparing detailed accounts of the current state of the Mayo towers. The towers that were constructed to accompany the signal masts, formally called signal defensible guard houses, are curious buildings and appear to have been built in a uniform fashion right around the coast. Typically they were square in plan, two stories tall and between five and six metres wide. One wall often thickened in the middle to incorporate a chimney. The doorway was on the first floor and accessed through a ladder which could be removed for security. The first floor consisted of an access passage and quarters for the lieutenant. The ground floor, accessed by a ladder from the first floor passage, was used for storage and sleeping quarters for the small military guard. The roof was also accessed by ladder from the first floor passage.[iv] Many of the towers were set within an enclosure defined by a stone wall or earthen bank, sometimes with an accompanying ditch. The enclosures were generally rectangular but more complicated designs were sometimes used, such as the keyhole shaped enclosures in parts of Cork. Only half of the Mayo towers being surveyed seem to have been surrounded by enclosures (Clare, Achill, Tower Hill and Glinsk), all simple rectangular designs.

It is probable that a design familiar to the local construction teams was chosen, namely the Tower House. The instruction may have been as simple as, like that, but smaller!

Northern and Southern elevations of Glosh Tower. These drawings are based on the rectified photographs and were digitised by the students using AutoCad 2007.

An older tradition
In this period, military architects and engineers were forward-looking and progressive. However, the towers appear to reflect an older tradition of military architecture, almost like miniaturised copies of late Medieaval tower houses. This is most apparent in the inclusion of machicolations around the edge of the roof and bartizans on the angles, whilst the enclosures, far too large to be defended by the small garrisons, seem to be copied from the bawns that surround many tower houses. There may be a simple explanation for this. The buildings were originally to be modelled on the Martello towers but this was ultimately rejected as they were to be constructed by local contractors with little supervision from military architects.[v] It is probable that a design familiar to the local construction teams was chosen, namely the Tower House. The instruction may have been as simple as like that, but smaller! The eight towers do appear very similar in form and it is possible that they were all built by a single contractor running multiple building crews.

Dig, Draw and Digitise

The Dig, Draw and Digitise course of the Achill field school is designed to equip students with the skills to undertake their own surveys and produce publication-ready results. As such, the emphasis is on techniques that are quick, simple and inexpensive, and it has become very apparent that fast recovery of data is important as the towers are suffering badly from the wild Atlantic weather. Further collapse could happen at any time: only one of the Mayo towers, Glosh on Belmullet, survives to close to its original height and this has a worryingly large fissure in its eastern wall. The other towers have slowly collapsed over the course of the last 200 years, a process well demonstrated through a series of photographs of the tower on Achill. A large portion of the tower on Clare Island collapsed as recently as the winter of 1989, whilst at the other end of the spectrum all traces of the tower at Creevagh seems to have been removed or entirely collapsed by the early 20 century.
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Plan of the tower and enclosure on Achill recorded by Achill field school students using a hand-held GPS unit.

An initial problem encountered was actually locating all of the sites as only general locations are given in Kerrigans account. Unfortunately the Ordnance Survey maps are less use than expected as the sites are marked variously as Signal Tower, Signal Post, Watch Tower, Tower, or simply not labelled at all. Interestingly the sites are easier to identify on Admiralty charts than the Ordnance Survey maps, as they continued to be used as maritime navigation aids long after the semaphore masts were removed. Indeed the guard tower on Achill is still used to help negotiate an area of shallows on the approach to Keel. Most of the sites in question have now been visited and it is hoped that the survey work will be completed by the end of this summer.

The slow collapse of the Achill signal tower during the 20th century.

Kerrigan has already highlighted the towers short-lived period of use, and in addition to surveying the sites researchers are working through photographs and maps to chart the towers collapse.[vi] For the majority, construction was begun in 1804 and most had been completed by 1806. However by 1809 decommissioning had begun as the French threat receded. The team plans to explore the subsequent lives of these buildings such as their use by the coast guard or other military establishments, and it is hoped a fairly detailed history for each tower cen be recovered. The team is also seeking to identify reports of the system in use, in particular any records that show how fast messages could be transmitted along individual stretches of the system, and how long it took to transmit messages from the furthest reaches back to Dublin. Finally, the goal is to eventually identify archival photographs that would be suitable for rectification and therefore allow more complete elevations of the collapsed towers to be prepared.