Tag Archives: Ruins

The Fate of Carrigafoyle Castle


‘Carrick and Carrig are the names of nearly seventy townlands, villages and towns, and form the beginning of about 555 others; craig and creag are represented by the various forms Crag, Craig, Creg, &c., and these constitute or begin about 250 names; they mean primarily a rock, but they are sometimes applied to rocky island.
Carrigafoyle, an island in the Shannon, near Ballylongford, Kerry, with the remains of Carrigafoyle castle near the shore, the chief seat of the O’Conors Kerry, is called in the annals, Carraig-an-phoill, the rock of the hole; and it took its name from a deep hole in the river immediately under the castle.’
From The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places by P.W. Joyce (1869)





‘Sir William Pelham and the earl of Ormond set out early this year [1580] on a fresh campaign in Desmond’s territory; the first marching first to Limerick in the beginning of February, and the latter to Cork, and both forming a junction at the foot of Slieve Mis, near Tralee. They spared neither age nor sex in their march, and, owing to the state of desolation to which the country had been reduced, suffered not a little inconvenience themselves for want of provisions. They then marched northwards to destroy the castles still garrisoned by Desmond’s men, and first laid siege to the strong castle of Carrigafoyle (Carrig-an-phuill) situated in an islet in the Shannon, on the coast of Kerry. The Four Masters say that Pelham landed some heavy ordnance from Sir William Winter’s fleet, which arrived on the Irish coast about this time, and battered a portion of the castle, crushing some of the warders beneath the ruins; but other annalists make no mention of cannon landed from the ships.’
From The History of Ireland, Ancient and Modern by Martin Haverty (1867)





‘For the rebels it was a losing game all through. Pelham and Ormond took Desmond’s strongholds one by one. Carrigafoyle Castle on the south shore of the Shannon was his strongest fortress. It was valiantly defended by fifty Irishmen and nineteen Spaniards, commanded by Count Julio an Italian engineer: but after being by cannon until a breach was made, it was taken by storm about the 27th March. Without delay the whole garrison, including Julio with six Spaniards and some women, were hanged or put to the sword…A few days after the capture of this fortress the garrisons of some others of Desmond’s castles, including Askeaton, abandoned them, terrified by the fate of Carrigafoyle.’
From A Short History of Ireland, from the Earliest Times to 1608 by P.W. Joyce (1893)


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Seventy Years Ago…


The charming cathedral dedicated to St Brendan in Clonfert, County Galway has featured here before (see The Traveller’s Rest « The Irish Aesthete). And because Clonfert was, until the 1833, a separate diocese in the Church of Ireland (it remains so in the Roman Catholic church), there was also an episcopal palace, now alas a sad ruin. Standing a short distance to the north of the cathedral, the oldest part of this building is thought to date back to the late 16th or early 17th century, possibly constructed during the episcopacy of Stephen Kirwan (bishop of Clonfert 1682-1701) who served as a justice and commissioner for the province of Connaught. There is no doubt that Clonfert, today a sleepy hamlet, was then judged a place of some importance since in 1579, Elizabeth I, in her Orders to be observed by Sir Nicholas Maltby for the better government of the province of Connaught’ declared ‘We are desirous that a college should be erected in the nature of an university in some convenient place in Ireland for instructing and education of youth in lerninge. And We conceive the Town of Clonfert within the province of Connaught to be aptlie seated both for helth and comodity of the ryver of Shenen running by it and because it is also neere to the midle of the realme, whereby all men may, with small travel send their children thither.’ The queen may have heard that during a much earlier period, Clonfert had been a great seat of learning, or perhaps it was just that the cathedral and its ancillary buildings were located in a central location and, as she observed, close to the river Shannon, then a major means of travel through Ireland. However, the idea of establishing a college here never happened, and it was only in 1592 that the country’s first university was founded in Dublin.





As mentioned, while parts of the former bishop’s palace in Clonfert may go back to the late 16th century, a more substantial portion of the building dates from c.1635, during the episcopacy of Robert Dawson, who had become Bishop of the newly-united dioceses of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh in 1627 and would hold that position until his death in 1643 (incidentally, he was also the forebear of a family that would go on to become great landowners and developers in Ireland, not least his great-grandson Joshua Dawson who was responsible for laying out Dawson Street in Dublin and building what is now the Mansion House). Oak beams and roof joists in the palace have been dated to around this period, although further changes and additions were made at some time in the 18th century, when a Venetian window was inserted.
In his memoirs, published in 1805, the playwright Richard Cumberland wrote about the palace in Clonfert, which he knew well since his father Denison Cumberland had lived there while bishop of the diocese (1763-1772). ‘This humble residence,’ he recalled, ‘was not devoid of comfort and convenience, for it contained some tolerable lodging rooms, and was capacious enough to receive me and mine without straitening the family. A garden of seven acres, well planted and disposed into pleasant walks, kept in the neatest order, was attached to the house, and at the extremity of a broad gravel walk in front stood the cathedral.’ Cumberland also remembered how, while staying with his father on one occasion, he used ‘a little closet at the back of the palace, as it was called, unfurnished and out of use, with no other prospect from my single window but that of a turf-stack’, as a room in which to begin writing what would prove to be his most successful stage work, the comedy The West-Indian (first performed at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1771). However, Clonfert was always one of the poorest episcopacies in the country and as a result successive bishops – many of whom managed to have themselves transferred to richer dioceses after only a short period of time – were disinclined to make improvements to their residence. For this reason, it retained much of its 17th century character, being long and low, of eight bays and two storeys with dormer windows. The surrounding demesne also underwent relatively few changes. There survives, for example, a yew walk running south-west of the palace, which may be even older, but certainly has the character of 17th century baroque garden design. Like the building to which it leads, the yew walk is now sadly neglected.




Clonfert Palace remained home to successive Church of Ireland bishops until 1834 when, following the creation of a new united diocese of Killaloe and Clonfert, it became surplus to requirements and was sold to John Eyre Trench. In 1947 his descendants sold the building to the Blake-Kelly family who, four years later, sold it to the next owners who would be the last people to live in the former palace. By then the place was in poor condition and required extensive renovation, along with the installation of electricity, new bathrooms and so forth before it could be occupied; the new chatelaine drove over from her temporary residence in Co Tipperary to oversee this work. Finally, once complete, in February 1952 she and her family arrived, along with a retinue that included housekeeper, cook, maid and chauffeur, as well as a gardener to maintain the grounds. A local newspaper, the Westmeath Independent, reported that ‘‘Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley, who have a large staff, are charmed with Ireland, its people, the tempo of its life and its scenery.’ The same publication also briefly noted that ‘Sir Oswald was the former leader of a political movement in England.’ The ‘political movement’ had, of course, been the British Union of Fascists (later the British Union) and both Sir Oswald and his wife, the former Diana Mitford, had been interned for a number of years during the second World War by the British government, and had found themselves shunned in the aftermath of their release. Ireland had several advantages, not least the fact that two of Diana Mosley’s sisters already owned properties in the country, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire at Lismore Castle, County Waterford and Pamela Jackson at Tullamaine Castle, County Tipperary. Country houses here were going cheap, and there were still sufficient other landed families still about to make life agreeable to the newly-arrived. For the next two years, the Mosleys remained contentedly at Clonfert, attracting little attention although they were discreetly observed by both the Irish and British governments. Such might have remained the case, had not disaster struck exactly 70 years ago, in early December 1954. At the time, Diana Mosley was in London, but her husband and their two children were in County Galway when fire broke out, seemingly caused by an old beam inside the chimney of the maids’ sitting room. The blaze spread quickly, so fast indeed that according to a report in the following day’s Irish Times, a French maid, Mademoiselle Cerrecoundo, who had run upstairs to rescue some clothes, became trapped in the building. Sir Oswald, his son Alexander and the chauffeur, Monsieur Thevenon, held a blanket beneath one of the windows and the maid leapt to her safety, with only minor injuries to her back and hand. Alas, the old palace was not so lucky and while a handful of rooms and their contents were saved, most of the building was lost as it took an hour and a half for fire brigades to reach Clonfert. The following day, hurricane-force winds and torrential rain ripped across the entire country, compounding the damage done to the house and leaving it a sorry wreck. In 1955 the Mosleys moved to Ileclash, a Georgian overlooking the river Blackwater in County Cork where they lived intermittently until 1963 when the couple moved to France. As for Clonfert Palace, despite being described on www.buildingsofireland.com in 2009 as being of national significance, it was left to moulder into its present advanced state of decay. What could have been saved as a rare example of late 16th/early 17th century Irish domestic architecture has been lost.


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Undaunted and Vigorous Still


‘Dunloe Castle stands on a bold promontory overlooking the river near the bridge. It has a worn, but wild and hardy look about it, as if it had suffered much at the hand of time, but remained undaunted and vigorous still. The view from the castle is most exquisite, and the row down the river will be found to be not the least interesting portion of the excursion…The castle has been kept in good repair by its various proprietors. Its position was, in former days, a strong one; and it was doubtless erected for the purpose of commanding the river and the pass into the mountains. In the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, it frequently stood the brunt of warfare; and in 1641 it was besieged and nearly demolished by the Parliamentary forces under Ludlow.’
From The Lakes of Killarney by Robert Michael Ballantyne (1865)




‘Let no one leave Killarney without rowing a mile or two down the Laune and visiting Dunloe Castle by water; – as we did in the “gloaming” of a summer evening, when the lake was calm – the grey fly floating on its surface, and the salmon and trout springing from the waters…but here stands the Castle on its bold promontory above the river – a firm, fearless looking keep, approached by a steep hill-road, recalling both by its shape and situation, one of the Rhine towers. Land, by all means and, as it is permitted, ascend; and passing through a turngate, walk along the terrace, which commands a view of the magnificent slopes, which a little pains might easily convert into hanging gardens. The greater part of the kitchen-offices were burnt some years ago, so that the dwelling-castle has a gaunt and isolated appearance, in accordance with the wild mountain scenery.’
From A Week in Killarney by Mr and Mrs S.C. Hall (1843)




‘As we drive along, behold beneath us a view of Dunloe Castle, the remains of an old fortress, that, like Ross Castle, was used by the turbulent chiefs of the country as a place of strength and security. It suffered many vicissitudes and, at last, during the reign of Oliver Cromwell, was partly demolished by bombardment. It has been, by some late repairs, converted into a very romantic residence by the late Major Mahoney, whose politeness and attention every stranger was sure to experience. There is an embattled walk around the top, from which an extensive view of the Lake and the surrounding mountains may be taken, if the stranger deem it of sufficient importance to pause for it.’
From A New Guide to the Scenery of Killarney by D.E. Fitzpatrick (1845)


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The Place of Pleasant Aspect



Popular belief proposes that Balleighan Abbey, County Donegal was founded close to the eastern shore of Lough Swilly by Hugh Dubh O’Donnell at the beginning of the 16th century. In fact the building is older than that and while it may have been associated with the O’Donnells, the place was a church of the Third Order of the Franciscans who had a friary directly opposite on the lough’s western side. The location’s name derives from the Irish The name is derived the Irish ‘Baile-aighidh-chaoin’, meaning the place of pleasant aspect, although this was hard to appreciate when the Irish Aesthete visited on a dank, grey afternoon. With little surviving decoration, the roofless church retains a singularly fine 15th century window with sinuous tracery, today mostly appreciated by cattle grazing in the surrounding fields. 



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In a Disused Graveyard


The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.




The verses in it say and say:
‘The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?




It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

In a Disused Graveyard by Robert Frost
Photographs of St Mary’s church and graveyard, Castlehill, County Down

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A Little Crazy



Hard to believe this is all that remains of Gallen Priory, County Offaly, a once-great religious house founded in 492AD by Saint Cadoc. After being badly damaged in the 9th century, the monastery here was restored by Welsh monks but several hundred years later, it came under the authority of the Augustinian order, remaining so until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1540s and thereafter falling into decay. Excavations of the site in the 1930s revealed parts of over 200 early Christian burial monuments and these have since been unsympathetically and randomly set in cement walls on the locations of what would have been the east and west gables of the church here, suggesting the inspiration was crazy paving.


A Fine Specimen


Handsomely set against a background of woodland, the 16th century tower house at Castlegrove, County Galway is known as both Feartagar Castle and Jennings Castle, the latter name derived from a family believed to have lived there for a period. The building is thought to have been constructed by the de Burgos (otherwise Burkes) who controlled much of the land in this part of the country, but the Jennings may indeed have been responsible, since the two families were related to each other. The surname Jennings originally McSeonins, or sons of John (de Burgo), which was first anglicised to Jonine and then to Jennings, sometimes spelled Jenings.




The castle comprises a rectangular, five-storey tower measuring some 12 by 10 metres. Both the eastern and west roof gables survive, as do chimney stacks on either end as well as on the northern side. At the top of each of the four corners are well-preserved curved bartizans, while above the pointed arch doorway on the eastern wall is a further machicolation. At various levels on every side are a series of arrow slits as well as a number of mullion windows with hood mouldings. Although apparently unoccupied since the mid-17th century, the building is in an excellent state of repair, certainly when compared with many other tower houses found elsewhere around the country. 




The castle is believed to have remained in the hands of the de Burgo or Jennings family until the 1650s when, like so many other such properties, it was taken from the owners by the Cromwellian government in the aftermath of the Confederate Wars. It was then granted to the Blakes, members of another well-known County Galway family who had likewise been displaced from their original land holdings. Successive generations of Blakes lived on the property until the mid-19th century, a new house being erected here in the 1830s. However, in the aftermath of the Great Famine, the entire estate was sold through the Encumbered Estates Court, bought for £15,750 by John Cannon. Following his death, it was sold again to Frederick Lewin and was inherited by his son Thomas before being burnt July 1922, seemingly by anti-Treaty forces. The remains are now lost in nearby woodland, with the older tower house today in better condition than its successor. 

State-Sponsored Neglect


Above are the front and rear elevations of Towerhill, County Mayo, a house believed to date from the close of the 18th century when built for Isidore Blake, whose descendants continued to own the property until 1948 when the building’s contents were auctioned and the place itself subsequently stripped of everything that might be removed, slates from the roof, floorboards and doorcases, chimneypieces and so forth. Of six bays and two storeys over basement, Towerhill is unusual in that all four sides of the house are pedimented, and finished to the same high standard; the architect responsible for this work is unknown. The property is now owned by the state’s forestry body, Coillte, which accounts for its neglected condition.


A Missed Opportunity




In her marvellous memoir Bricks and Flower, Katherine Everett described how, in August 1922 and at the age of 50, she had cycled from Limerick to Macroom, County Cork at the request of her distant cousin and godmother Olive, Lady Ardilaun to see what remained of the latter’s property, a castle in the centre of the town which had just been burned by anti-Treaty forces. Located above the river Sullane, the castle dates back to the 12th century and for several hundred years was occupied by the McCarthys before eventually passing into the ownership of the Hedges Eyre family before eventually being inherited by Lady Ardilaun. Two years after the fire, she sold the castle to a group of local businessmen; the main part of the building was demolished in the 1960s, with just the outer walls remaining, a series of mediocre school buildings erected within them. What survives suffers badly from neglect (as indeed does the river and the nine-arch bridge crossing which dates from c.1800) with the local county council failing to make the most of what has potential to be a popular visitor attraction. Instead, Macroom’s most significant piece of architectural heritage as been left to moulder: a missed opportunity.


A Well Selected Site


‘The Cathedral of Aghadoe  or Achadh-dá-eó’ (the Field of the Two Yews) is situated three miles west of Killarney, on high ground, 405 feet above sea level, from which, perhaps, a better general idea of the magnificence of the lake and mountain scenery of the district can be got than from any other point of vantage in the neighbourhood. The ground slopes up the whole way from the north shore of the Lower Lake to the Cathedral, a distance of about a mile. No one who has visited any considerable number of ancient ecclesiastical buildings can fail to have been struck by the care which the monks took in selecting sites where feelings of religious devotion might be intensified by the contemplation of all that is beautiful in nature. Sometimes the church stands beside a brawling stream, amidst the sylvan scenery of some secluded glen; or it is found by the banks of the broad river flowing through the rich meadows of the plain; or, as at Aghadoe, the charm lies in the extent of the landscape to be seen from an elevation, with its ever-changing effects of light and shade and variations of colour. The ecclesiastical remains at Aghadoe consist of the ruins of the Cathedral and the stump of a round tower, besides which are the mouldering remains of an old castle on the grassy hill-side sloping down towards the Lake. A church was founded here at a very early period by St Finan, the Leper, who also founded the monastery of Innisfallen, and whose festival is held on March 16th. Aghadoe afterwards became the site of a bishopric which was in later times joined to that of Ardfert…’
From ‘Notes on the Antiquities in Co Kerry’ by J. Romilly Allen, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Volume II, Fifth Series, 1892





‘All the interest of this building is concentrated in the west door. It is of four orders. The external order is more or less destroyed; it is now composed of three different ornaments, parts of three arches which have been stuck in when the door was repaired and patched up. I have rubbings of one…it is an uncommon variety of the incised chevron. The height of this doorway above the present level of the ground is 5ft 3in; the width at the top is 2ft 7in, and 2 ft 9in at the bottom. The bases of the jambs are square, plain and slightly projecting. The shafts have the rope pattern with beads…There is a peculiar ornament running around one of the orders. I should say the height of the jambs is 5ft 8in, not 4ft, and that one-third of their length is hidden which spoils the proportions of the door as represented. It is built of sandstone which is said to have been brought from a distance, there being none like it to be found for many miles around…’
From Notes on Irish Architecture by Edwin, third Earl of Dunraven, edited by Margaret Stokes (London, 1877)





‘The Castle or Military Tower is situated outside the churchyard, a little way down the hill to the south. It is a circular Norman keep of the thirteenth century, 21 ft diameter inside, having walls about 6ft thick, rudely built of rounded, water-worn boulders. A staircase in the thickness of the wall leads to the first floor, and there are indications of a second floor above. The doorway is on the east side on a level with the ground. The tower stands within a square intrenchment, having projecting bastions of the south side.’
From ‘Report on the Forty-Sixth Annual General Meeting at Kerry, Ireland’. Archaeologica Cambrensis, The Journal of the Cambrian Archaeological Society, Volume IX, Fifth Series, 1892)