Mallow Castle, County Cork has featured here before (see Unrealised Potential, May 8th 2017) when the later house, and its neglect since being acquired by the local authority in 2010, was discussed. Today provides an opportunity to look at the older house on the same site. In fact that older building replaced an even earlier castle, originally built by the Anglo-Norman de Rupe (otherwise Roche) family. In 1282 the Roches exchanged their land here with the Desmond branch of the FitzGerald dynasty for property in Connacht, and a more substantial castle was constructed. The Desmonds remained here for the next 300 years but following the suppression of the second Desmond Rebellion in the early 1580s and the onset of the Munster Plantation, Mallow was granted by Elizabeth I to Sir Thomas Norreys whose descendants would remain there until 1984.

The Norreys – or Norris – family came from Berkshire, several brothers coming to Ireland to fight in the English army in the last quarter of the 16th century. The most successful of the siblings was Sir John Norreys, a personal friend of the queen (his grandfather, Sir Henry Norreys, had been executed alongside Elizabeth I’s mother Anne Boleyn on trumped-up charges of adultery with her). Sir John initially arrived in this country in 1574, spending time in Ulster before spending almost ten years in the Low Countries supporting Protestant opponents of Spanish rule. He was briefly in Ireland in 1584, when appointed President of Munster, but soon left to fight again on mainland Europe. Eventually he came here a third time in 1595, dying in Mallow two years later, supposedly in the arms of his younger brother Thomas. The latter had arrived in Ireland at the end of 1579 and stayed here for the next twenty years until his own death, again at Mallow. During this time, he was almost constantly at war with the native Irish. Nevertheless, during this time he embarked on building a new residence in Mallow where, in addition to the old castle, he had been granted some 6,000 acres.

As seen today, Mallow Castle incorporates part of the older castle but was designed to be a fortified manor house, similar to those erected during the same period at Donegal (see Oh! Solitary Fort that Standest Yonder, April 17th 2017) and Kanturk (see An Abandoned Project, December 7th 2015). Of four storeys with projecting bays at the centre of each long wall flanked by gables, the building has octagonal turrets at the corners of north- and south-west corners: the roofline was decorated with stepped battlements. Mullioned windows provided light to the interior, a stone wall dividing the house in half, other partitions being of wood. It was here that Sir Thomas Norreys died in 1599, the Mallow estate inherited by his only child Elizabeth who married another English soldier, Major-General Sir John Jephson. Their descendants continued to occupy the castle, which survived being siege and capture during the Confederate Wars of the 1640s. However, in 1689 the castle was burnt, seemingly on the instructions of James II, and rendered uninhabitable. The Jephsons then converted the former stable block into a house, before this was made over in the 1830s to the designs of Edward Blore. The old castle has remained as a picturesque ruin.