Clondalkin Round Tower

This tall and slender round tower was erected on the site of a monastery that was founded in the 7th century by Saint Mochua, otherwise called Saint Cronan. The religious settlement was plundered several times during the Viking raids in the 9th and 10th centuries. Three other such towers can be found in the county of Dublin, at Lusk, Swords and Rathmichael.

In total the tower is 25.6 meters (84 feet) high and stands on a projecting or buttressed base of solid masonry that is 3.9 meters (13 feet) high and reaches up to the entry doorway. In the collection of the National Library of Ireland is an annotated drawing by Gabriel Beranger, dated to 1767, which states that this base was a modern addition and was made to strengthen the tower as it had been damaged in the past.

A report in Saunders’ Newsletter, on Wednesday 25th April 1787, recorded the destruction that an explosion wrought to the Clondalkin neighbourhood when the gunpowder mills at Moyle Park, a short distance south by south-west from the round tower, blew up, causing much damage to buildings that sat between the two locations. Included were the following extracts: "A number of trees were destroyed, and stones of considerable magnitude hurled with a prodigious impetus to the distance of a mile and a half………Several neighbouring and some distant cottages were also unroofed or demolished, and the windows of many habitations on the road to Clondalkin, and round the country for miles, broken….Notwithstanding the violent concussive agitation of the earth, the round tower, which has, for so many ages braved the attacks of the elements, withstood this last assault; part of the gavel end of the old church was however beat down, and several rafters, just laid on the new church, were demolished by some of the stones or pieces of timber which were driven in all directions."

Unlike the tower’s seeming good fortune, a drawing made shortly before this catastrophe by Thomas Archdeakon, of the round tower and the old church that stood nearby, was subsequently annotated with the following information: "A view of Clondalkin Church - These old remains were demolished by the blowing of the powder mills in their neighbourhood sometime after the drawing was made."

As illustrated in an issue of the Dublin Penny Journal in 1833, as well as in other 19th century drawings and engravings, the tower has remained in excellent condition, then, as now, sitting at the very edge of the western side of Tower Road in the centre of Clondalkin village. Directly opposite it, to the east, is St. John’s Church of Ireland, upon which site once stood the earlier church, the ruins of which appear in various drawings up to 1792. This is the church that was damaged by the powder mill explosion.

The tower is believed to be of a very early age, especially given its builders’ use of a rough undressed variety of local calp limestone. Its tall drum is also extremely narrow, its diameter at the widest point being only 4.05 m (13.3 ft) meters. In 1842, in his ’Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland’, William Henry Bartlett wrote that there were no traces of a stairway in the tower but that ladders were put in place so as to enable the curious visitor to reach the uppermost storey. At its topmost level there are four rectangular windows, each aligned to the capital points of the compass. Only one other very small south-facing window can be seen, mid-way up the drum. The tower is topped by what appears to be its original conical stone cap.

The steps that lead from ground level to the entrance door of the tower were added at sometime between 1845 and 1848, as contemporary illustrations show them absent at the earlier date and present at the later one.

The round tower now stands in the south-eastern corner of a very well presented cultural complex, called the Brú Chrónáin Visitor Centre, which contains an excellent museum and café and a very cleverly designed garden that is planted with trees, shrubs and herbs that would have been familiar to the old monastic inhabitants for their medicinal and nutritional qualities.

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This national monument is protected in accordance with the National Monuments Acts 1930 to 2014