Qualla: Ballinacarriga Castle

Ballinacarriga Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 456valerie, CC BY-SA 4.0. Halfway up the eastern wall of Ballinacarriga Castle, set into the masonry where most castles would have a coat of arms or a defensive slot, there is a Sheela Na Gig. She is a small, exaggerated stone carving of a naked woman displaying her vulva - one of those medieval figures found scattered across cathedrals, castles and parish churches from Ireland to Spain, whose meaning no one is entirely sure of. Some scholars argue she wards off death, evil and demons. Others see a survival of a pre-Christian fertility goddess or mother figure. At Ballinacarriga she watches the approach to a 16th-century tower house perched on a rock above a small village in West Cork - Béal na Carraige in Irish, the Mouth of the Rock - and she has been watching for roughly four hundred years.

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Image: 456valerie | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballinacarriga Castle: The Hurleys and Their Castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit dougf, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Ó Muirthile family - anglicised as O'Hurley - built Ballinacarriga in the sixteenth century. They were a native Irish clan, not the Norman or English colonists who built so many of Ireland's other tower houses, and they raised this one in stone on a rocky rise about nine kilo...

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Image: dougf | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballinacarriga Castle: A Chapel in the Tower

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SlaineMacRoth, CC BY-SA 4.0. What the new Protestant owners did not entirely know - or perhaps did know but tolerated - was that a room in the tower had been used for Catholic worship during the years when public Catholic services were illegal across most of Ireland. The chamber still bears some of its devot...

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Image: SlaineMacRoth | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballinacarriga Castle: Bartizans and Murder Holes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Searle, CC BY-SA 2.0. Architecturally Ballinacarriga is dense with defensive features for so small a building. Overhanging corner turrets called bartizans project from the upper walls, equipped with arrow slits. The castle once had a machicolation - the opening through which boiling liquid or stones c...

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Image: Mike Searle | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballinacarriga Castle: Quiet Ruin

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SlaineMacRoth, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today Ballinacarriga is in good structural condition but is not open to the public. The walls stand. The bartizans are still there. The Sheela Na Gig is still set into her wall, weathered but visible to anyone who knows where to look. Just beyond the castle is a school - a small ...

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Image: SlaineMacRoth | CC BY-SA 4.0