Please note change of venue for this meeting

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday, 12th February at 6:30pm in Armagh County Museum (in the ground floor reading room, kindly made available by the Natural History and Philosophical Society). Our Annual General Meeting will take place first, starting at 6:30pm, followed by the talk at 7:00 pm.

Our speaker this month will be archaeologist Paul Logue, who specialises in Gaelic society, conflict and identity in Ireland c.1200-1650 and has published widely on those topics since the early 1990s. He will be discussing:

Richard Bartlett and the Lost Castle of Armagh

English military cartographer Richard Bartlett’s 1602 image of Armagh is normally taken to indicate a deserted town on the eve of capture by the crown’s Lord Deputy Mountjoy. Previous descriptions of it stress an unoccupied town in ruins save for a small secular community in thatched wicker cabins. In addition, various layers of deeper meaning have been put upon the image linking it with contemporary English messages of a failed Gaelic order and the supposed advance of civilisation into Ulster. This talk re-examines the image highlighting previously missed aspects, reinterpreting the message, and also identifying the site of ‘the lost castle of Armagh’ brought back to the light by Kevin Quinn.