Killeedy, County Limerick was originally called Cluain Chreadháil, meaning ‘the meadow with a good depth of soil.’ However, its name changed after this part of the country became associated with Saint Íte (otherwise Ita), said to have embodied the six virtues of Irish womanhood: wisdom, purity, beauty, musical ability, gentle speech and needle skills. Interesting to see the last of these judged a virtue. Although born in County Waterford, at the age of sixteen Íte is supposed to have been led by a series of heavenly lights to Cluain Chreadháil where she founded a convent and there spent the rest of her life As a result, the place came to be called Cill Íde (the Church of Ita), anglicised to Killeedy.

Thought to stand on the site of an older building dating from the 10th century, Glenquin Castle in Killeedy was built by the O’Hallinan family (their name deriving from the Irish Ó hAilgheanáin, meaning mild or noble). When the castle was built seems unclear; both the mid-15th and mid-16th centuries are proposed. Regardless, it is typical of tower houses being constructed at the time right around the country. Of limestone and rectangular in shape, it measures 10×15 metres and rises six storeys and some 20 metres high, to a crenellated roofline. Each floor is reached via a spiral staircase located to the left of the entrance doorcase (which has a murder hole directly above it). Two of the six storeys hold substantial barrel vaulted rooms, and some of the rooms have paired arched windows. 

In typical behaviour of the time, the O’Hallinans appear to have been dispossessed of Glenquin Castle by the O’Briens, but then fell into the hands of the Geraldines during the course of the Desmond Rebellions before being confiscated by the English crown in 1571. Granted to Sir Walter Raleigh, who supposedly demolished part of the structure, the castle was then granted to Sir William Courtenay, who received large tracts of former Desmond land, amounting to some 85,000 acres in this part of the country. In the 1840s the castle was restored by Alfred Furlong, agent to the tenth Earl of Devon (a descendant of Sir William Courtenay). Further work on the site was undertaken in more recent times by the Office of Public Works, hence its surprisingly tidy present appearance.