Parke's Castle

O'Rourke's tower house at Baile Nua first appears in the Annals of Lough Ce in 1546, in a record of treachery practised there by the sons of Alexander MacCabe, suggesting a mid-16th-century date. Brian O'Rourke took the chieftaincy and lordship of West Breifne in 1566 after succession disputes with his brothers. The English seized his castle at Leitrim in 1578, though he was knighted that October; by 1580 he was in open revolt and dismantled Leitrim himself rather than let it be occupied, and the following year broke down his castles at Newtowne and Dromahair for the same reason.

He sheltered around eighty Spanish Armada survivors shipwrecked at Streedagh beach in Sligo in September 1588, which the English, with the Anglo-Spanish War underway, treated as treason. Richard Bingham, Governor of Connacht, moved on him at Newtowne, but Brian escaped, to Doe Castle in Donegal for a year and then to Scotland to raise gallowglass. James VI, pressed by Elizabeth I, had him arrested and extradited to London, the first extradition case in Ireland and Britain. Denied a lawyer and any sight of the charges, he was convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 3 November 1591. The Gaelic tower house and bawn were confiscated by the Crown.

The Plantation of Leitrim began in 1620, settling English and Scottish colonists on confiscated Gaelic land. Newtowne went first to Sir William Irving of the Privy Council, then to Sir John Spottiswood. When Robert Parke acquired the O'Rourke site is unclear, but by 1628 he held a licence for a weekly market and two annual fairs at Newtowne, and had 1,000 acres mortgaged from Con O'Rourke.

With the tower house remains demolished, the gatehouse went up first, then towers at the north-west and north-east corners, the manor house last and probably finished in the mid-1630s; the bawn was reinforced with crenellations and shot holes, and the courtyard cobbled over the last traces of the Gaelic castle.

Parke became a Justice of the Peace and MP for Roscommon in 1641, and attempted to remain neutral when rebellion broke out. Sir Frederick Hamilton, a planter besieged several times in his own castle at Manorhamilton, was outraged. Riding home in the spring of 1642, he found Newtowne unattacked, and was told the rebels' cows had grazed to the bawn walls unhindered by Parke and his sixty-strong garrison, and that the Irish passed freely with provisions from Sligo to their camp at Cornastauk. Hamilton burned the village, which 'so long had relieved and sheltered the rogues', and put some of the inhabitants to the sword.

He arrested Parke in July 1642 and the same night took him and some of his soldiers against Sligo town, afterwards boasting that 300 were 'put to the sword and the town burned'; Sligo Abbey burned in the raid. The attack on the town has been argued as a response to the Sligo Gaol massacre of Protestant settlers. Parke was then kept at Manorhamilton for almost two years despite repeated orders for his release, and got out only through a pardon obtained by his father-in-law Sir Edward Povey, while Hamilton was in Derry. Newtowne was held by Parliamentarians in 1649 and surrendered to Royalist forces on 10 July; in May 1652 the Royalists surrendered it to Sir Charles Coote.

Parke was resident again after the fighting, serving as High Sheriff of Leitrim in 1656 and 1668, and was granted thousands of acres in Sligo and Leitrim under the Act of Settlement after the Cromwellian conquest. He died in the autumn of 1671. His surviving daughter Ann married Sir Francis Gore of Lissadell House, and the castle passed to the Gores, who abandoned it soon afterwards. Protestants garrisoned it briefly in 1688 during the Williamite Wars, and Sir Thomas Cocking drew it in a ruinous state in 1791. The manor house stood uninhabited for almost two centuries, the bawn used locally as a farmyard and stables into the early 20th century. The Irish Free State purchased the site in 1935.

Excavation began in the early 1970s, funded by Queen's University Belfast over four seasons. The foundations of the O'Rourke tower house came up from beneath the courtyard cobbles, along with over a thousand objects from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the later material indicating reuse. The Office of Public Works then restored the buildings using traditional woodworking, and the site opened to visitors seasonally in 1990. It is a national monument in State care, open from March to November for a small admission fee.