Qualla: Ballycarbery Castle

Ballycarbery Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User Scummy on en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5. Travel guides love Ballycarbery for the same reason photographers do: the castle stands alone on a grass hill above the sea, three kilometers from Cahersiveen, with no other buildings in the frame. Half a wall is missing on the back side, which lets light fall through the windows in a way that intact castles cannot manage. The ruin photographs at almost any hour. What looks pleasingly picturesque from a parking area was, in 1652, the wrong end of an artillery duel - and the cannon won. The fall of Ballycarbery is the reason the ruin looks the way it does.

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Image: User Scummy on en.wikipedia | CC BY 2.5

Ballycarbery Castle: A MacCarthy Tower House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kwrecks, CC BY-SA 4.0. Some sources suggest a residence stood on this site as early as 1398, but what survives is a sixteenth-century tower house, built in the period when Gaelic and Anglo-Norman families across Munster were raising similar fortified houses across the countryside. The castle was associ...

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Image: Kwrecks | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballycarbery Castle: The Cannon of 1652

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kwrecks, CC BY-SA 4.0. The castle's working life ended in 1652. By that year, the Parliamentary armies of the new English Commonwealth had been working their way through Ireland for nearly three years, pacifying the last royalist and confederate strongholds after Oliver Cromwell's main campaign of 1649...

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Image: Kwrecks | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballycarbery Castle: What the Eighteenth Century Did With It

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shane Gavin, CC BY-SA 2.0. A ruined castle, in the eighteenth-century countryside, was a quarry. The Lauder family built a house on the site using one wall of the castle's barn as a structural element - a practical reuse that turned the medieval shell into a piece of domestic architecture. That house was e...

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Image: Shane Gavin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballycarbery Castle: Closed Gates, Open View

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tomosullivan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Until around 2017, visitors could walk freely around the castle and climb the surviving stairs. The land is private, and the owner has since closed access for health and safety reasons. Falling stones and unprotected drops were not theoretical risks. Today, you view Ballycarbery ...

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Image: Tomosullivan | CC BY-SA 3.0