The story of Moyry Castle
Moyry Castle was built in June 1601 by Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, the English Lord Deputy of Ireland, during the closing years of the Nine Years' War against Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. The pass it guards, the Gap of the North, was the key route between Ulster and Leinster, and whoever held it controlled movement in and out of O'Neill's heartland.
The year before, in autumn 1600, Mountjoy's army of around 3,000 foot and 300 horse had tried to force the pass against O'Neill's troops, who had fortified it with trenches and earthworks. The fighting over several days in late September and early October was bloody and inconclusive. To finally secure the ground, Mountjoy ordered a stone keep raised in the pass, and it was completed in roughly a month in 1601.
A Captain Anthony Smith was made constable and left to hold the castle with twelve men. The tower had a short military life but saw use again in the 1641 rising, and the pass below carried King William's army north in 1690 during the Williamite War. The squat tower with its rounded corners, gun-loops and machicolation was always a soldier's building rather than a residence, which is why it has no internal stair.
The castle was taken into state guardianship in the twentieth century, with preservation records noting it as early as 1932. Today it stands in the townland of Carrickbroad as a State Care Historic Monument, cared for by the Department for Communities, with one stretch of its bawn wall surviving beside the roofless tower.