When the workmen began pulling down Dunmanway Castle in the early 1800s, they broke through into something they had not expected: a subterranean chamber beneath the foundations, full of rubble and earth, that turned out to be the castle's granary. From this underground store, the chronicler Bennett recorded, the medieval Geraldines and their successors the McCarthys had once drawn supplies for their kern - the lightly-armed Gaelic foot soldiers - and their gallowglass mercenaries, who had repeatedly struck terror into rival chieftains and waged the hopeless campaign of trying to push the English settlers back out of West Cork. By the time the granary was opened, the Geraldines and the McCarthys were long gone, the castle was being demolished to build something else, and Dunmanway itself was a quiet market town in a Protestant-owned countryside. The fort of the gables had become its own grave goods.
The Annals of the Four Masters record that the tower house called Dun-na-m-beann was built by Catherine Fitzgerald - the daughter of Thomas FitzGerald, 7th Earl of Desmond, and the wife of Finghin MacCarthy Reagh. 'It was by her,' the annals say, 'that Beann-dubh and Dun-na-m-beann were erected.' She built two: Beann-dubh became Castle Salem, near Rosscarbery, and Dun-na-m-beann was Dunmanway. It is claimed to be the very first tower house built in this part of Carbery - the founding example of an architectural form that would later spread across most of Munster. Catherine died in 1506. After her death, the castle likely passed from the MacCarthy Reaghs to the related MacCarthys of Gleannacroim - the cousin branch who had been the dominant clan in the district since the mid-13th century. The first stone castle in Carbery had a woman's name attached to its origins, in a culture that did not always remember such things.
What the name actually means has never been entirely settled. The Irish-language scholar John O'Donovan argued that Dun-na-mbeann simply described the structure - 'the fort of the gables or pinnacles' - referring to the tower's distinctive roof line. Another reading translated the older form Dun Meadhon Mhuige as 'fort of the middle plain'. But the History of Bandon recorded a more peculiar derivation: 'the fort of the yellow women'. According to that account, the 'yellow women' were Spanish soldiers who had garrisoned the castle, mocked by the Irish locals for the colour of their skin and the colour of the cloaks they wore. The story was apparently corroborated by the discovery, on the castle site, of Spanish coins dating to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Whether Spaniards really garrisoned a Carbery tower house in the late 1400s, or whether someone simply lost a purse of foreign silver one day, the coins were real, and the nickname survived.
In 1584 the clan chieftain Tadhg-an-Fhorsa was granted a pardon by Queen Elizabeth - recorded with antique formality as 'Teig M'Dermod M'Cormoek M'Cartie, alias Teighe O'Norso, of Downeboy [Dunmanway], gent' - for his role in the Desmond Rebellions, the long Munster uprising that had ended in famine, massacre, and the breaking of the Geraldines. The pardon let him keep his lands. In 1652, after the Cromwellian conquest, his widow Honor O'Donovan and her youngest son Callahan were still living in the castle. By 1670 the Books of Survey and Distribution recorded a Lieutenant-Colonel William Arnopp as the new owner of the Dunmanway townland - one of countless Cromwellian soldiers granted Irish land in payment for service. On 16 August 1692, Arnopp's son Peirce sold his 2,932-acre share to Sir Richard Cox, the rising lawyer who would become Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Cox is one of the candidates the demolition tradition assigns to the castle's destruction: he is said to have pulled it down for stone to build his own house. According to Reverends Lyons and Gillman, however, the walls did not actually disappear until around 1830. By that point the castle had stood for roughly three and a half centuries.
Nothing of Dunmanway Castle stands above ground today. The site is on the north bank of the Sally River - a small tributary that runs through the town of Dunmanway - and the National Monuments Service classifies it as the location of an Anglo-Norman masonry castle, even though it was actually built by Gaelic patronage. The Annals say what the chroniclers could record, the place-name keeps an echo of the building, and the workmen who opened the granary in the early 19th century saw the last interior of a tower whose first interior had been seen by Catherine Fitzgerald's household nearly four centuries earlier. The MacCarthys of Gleannacroim - the cousins of the great MacCarthy Reaghs and the MacCarthy Mórs - had used this place as their chief residence for two hundred years. Then a Cromwellian officer was given it, then a baronet bought it, then the stones became part of another building, and the only thing left under the modern Dunmanway streetscape is the soil, and whatever Spanish coins are still in it.
Located at 51.72 N, 9.12 W on the northern bank of the Sally (Saileach) River, within the modern town of Dunmanway in West Cork. The site is no longer visible from the air - the castle was demolished by approximately 1830 and built over - but the town itself sits along the R586 in a green valley between low hills. Cruise altitude 2,000-4,000 ft gives the best context for the town and the surrounding river. Cork airport (EICK) lies about 33 nm to the east; Kerry (EIKY) about 32 nm to the northwest.