Qualla: Cantwell's Castle

Cantwell's Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk into the lobby of Cantwell's Castle and look up. There, set into the stone vault between the ground floor and the first, gapes a small dark opening - a murder hole - through which a defender could pour boiling water or fire on whoever made it through the door. Another waits between the first floor and the second. The Cantwells, Anglo-Norman incomers who arrived with Strongbow in the late twelfth century, built this limestone tower house in the south of County Kilkenny to live in, but they built it expecting trouble. Trouble, when it finally came, wore the iron buff coat of Oliver Cromwell.

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Image: A.-K. D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cantwell's Castle: Of Suffolk, of Strongbow, of Sandfortscourt

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0. The first Cantwell on Irish soil appears in the records in 1177 as Hugh de Cantwelle - the spelling unsettled, the family lately of Suffolk, possibly out of Kentwell Hall. Surnames in that century were still hardening into shape, and the Cantwells passed through Conteville and Ca...

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Image: A.-K. D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cantwell's Castle: The architecture of suspicion

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0. The castle was built for a world in which neighbours might arrive with axes. Its two ground-floor windows splay outward in the northeast and northwest walls - splays wide enough that a man with a longbow could swing his aim, which the historian William Carrigan took as evidence t...

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Image: A.-K. D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cantwell's Castle: 1649: the year of the parley

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garry Dickinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the autumn of 1649 the Cantwell castles were garrisoned by English, Welsh and Scottish officers - Royalists, by the broad and twisting allegiances of that war - and Cromwell's army was marching on Kilkenny. The defenders did the thing that small garrisons facing a larger force...

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Image: Garry Dickinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cantwell's Castle: What survives, and what reads as warning

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the building is roofless from the first floor up, its upper rooms open to weather. The view from the surviving window seats still rewards a climb. The two murder holes still look down into spaces where attackers would have come, the geometry of menace unchanged by four cent...

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Image: A.-K. D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cantwell's Castle: A castle in a countryside of castles

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Cantwell's Castle does not stand alone. Within a few kilometres, the Purcell family's Ballyfoyle Castle and the Shortall family's Clara Castle ride the same low ridges. The Cantwells themselves built more than this one: Moycarky Castle in Tipperary, with its impressively high adj...

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Image: A.-K. D. | CC BY-SA 4.0