Qualla: Ballyhannon Castle https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:11 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/3/s/ballyhannon-castle-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Ballyhannon Castle https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle Ballyhannon Castle: Introduction https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle/ Photo credit Roger Diel, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most Irish castles you see today are ruins - rooflines collapsed, floors gone, walls reduced to picturesque silhouettes against the sky. Ballyhannon Castle is not that. The tower built around 1490 by Hugh MacNamara and his brother Síoda still stands as it was meant to stand: four storeys under a stone vault, complete with murder hole, spiral staircase of 72 steps, trefoil-headed windows, and a garderobe in the southeast corner. Walk in the south door and the medieval still works. That is the thing this castle has done best, for five hundred and thirty years - it has refused to fall down.

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Image: Roger Diel | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/3/s/ballyhannon-castle-wp/gc3s-ballyhannon-castle-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Ballyhannon Castle: The Golden Age of Tower Houses https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle/ Photo credit Roger Diel, CC BY-SA 2.0. Thomas Johnson Westropp, the antiquarian who walked County Clare with notebooks in the early 20th century, called the late 15th century "the Golden Age of castle-building in Thomond." He meant it technically: the masons of north Munster in that period had reached a level of skill...

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Image: Roger Diel | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/3/s/ballyhannon-castle-wp/gc3s-ballyhannon-castle-the-golden-age-of-tower-houses.mp3 0:06 2 full Ballyhannon Castle: Plantations and Rebellions https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle/ Photo credit Roger Diel, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1626 the 5th Earl of Thomond rented Ballyhannon to one Robert Hawksworth - one of the English Protestant settlers brought into Clare and planted on lands the O'Briens had nominally retained. This is what triggered, fifteen years later, the Irish Rebellion of 1641: dispossessed...

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Image: Roger Diel | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/3/s/ballyhannon-castle-wp/gc3s-ballyhannon-castle-plantations-and-rebellions.mp3 0:06 3 full Ballyhannon Castle: The Castle That Cromwell Forgot https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle/ Photo credit Roger Diel, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cromwell's Parliamentary forces took most of Ireland's tower houses apart deliberately, knocking off the floors and roofs to render them indefensible. Somehow Ballyhannon was missed. A 1675 sketch in the Edenvale Survey shows the castle still roofed, in good repair, surrounded by...

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Image: Roger Diel | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/3/s/ballyhannon-castle-wp/gc3s-ballyhannon-castle-the-castle-that-cromwell-forgot.mp3 0:06 4 full Ballyhannon Castle: The Last Inhabited Tower https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle/ Photo credit Roger Diel, CC BY-SA 2.0. Hely Dutton, writing in 1808, noted that Castlefergus was "inhabited and lately white-washed." That is an extraordinary line - a 15th-century tower house, still occupied, still maintained, in the era of Jane Austen. It seems to have stayed inhabited until around the 1820s, perhap...

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Image: Roger Diel | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/3/s/ballyhannon-castle-wp/gc3s-ballyhannon-castle-the-last-inhabited-tower.mp3 0:06 5 full Ballyhannon Castle: What Robert Twigge Saw https://qualla.com/ballyhannon-castle/ Photo credit Roger Diel, CC BY-SA 2.0. Robert Twigge described Ballyhannon in the early 1900s in the technical language of a man who measured what he documented. The castle stands on a low rock, scarped to the west, with no outworks (the 1675 bawn wall had been removed by then). The pointed south door is defended by a...

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Image: Roger Diel | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/3/s/ballyhannon-castle-wp/gc3s-ballyhannon-castle-what-robert-twigge-saw.mp3 0:06 6 full