Qualla: Cloghan Castle, Lough Hyne

Cloghan Castle, Lough Hyne: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Superbass, CC BY-SA 4.0. Folklore in West Cork is rarely tidy. The story Cloghan Castle is best known for is this: that the tower, after standing on its little wooded island in Lough Hyne for two centuries or so, was brought down in the middle of the nineteenth century by the barking of a black dog that haunted it. The more prosaic version, which historians prefer, is that the mortar was bad. Both stories are probably true. The castle was built fast and cheap from soft local sandstone bonded with a poor-strength mortar lavishly applied. By the 1850s, when the antiquarian George Du Noyer turned up with a sketchbook, the tower was already a ruin, and W. B. Yeats, who passed through in the summer of 1919, found it a ruin still. It is a ruin now -- a south-western corner of the tower and a north-eastern corner of the enclosure, covered in ivy, lying low on Castle Island in a lough that almost no one has reason to visit.

Image: Superbass | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cloghan Castle, Lough Hyne: An Unusually Deep Lough

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869), Public domain. Lough Hyne is not really a lake. It is a sea lough, connected to the Atlantic by a narrow tidal rapids that fills and empties twice a day, and the lough is deep -- up to 44 metres in places, surrounded by hills rising to 200 metres. The combination makes the basin curiously shelt...

Image: George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869) | Public domain

Cloghan Castle, Lough Hyne: Mortar Like a Memory

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869), Public domain. What survives of the tower is enough to read it. It was a square-sided four-storey house with a small enclosure attached to its eastern side, built of rough-hewn blocks of the local Old Red Sandstone. The blocks were small enough to be lifted by hand. The mortar holding them toge...

Image: George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869) | Public domain

Cloghan Castle, Lough Hyne: Sir Fineen's Last House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869), Public domain. The O'Driscolls were one of the richest Irish clans of the medieval period, controlling the waters off this corner of Cork and the lucrative pilchard fisheries that swam through them. By 1629 Cloghan Castle had become the seat of their family chief, Sir Fineen O'Driscoll, who had...

Image: George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869) | Public domain

Cloghan Castle, Lough Hyne: Donkey-Eared Kings and Black Dogs

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869), Public domain. Folklore around Cloghan is rich for a building that no one important lived in for very long. The black dog (in the wider Irish tradition, the Cù-sìth, a fairy hound of the otherworld) is one. Another, more obscure story claims the castle was once the home of a legendary king with...

Image: George Victor Du Noyer MRIA (1817 – 3 January 1869) | Public domain