Qualla: Loughmoe Castle

Loughmoe Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Santista1982, Public domain. The Purcell coat of arms shows four boars' heads. The legend behind those heads goes like this: long ago, when Loughmoe was thick forest and the castle was ruled by a king, a giant wild boar and his sow terrorised the country, uprooting crops and killing anyone they met. The king promised his only daughter and the castle and the surrounding land to any man who could kill them both. Many tried; many failed. Then a young man named Purcell took up the challenge. He found the sow first and killed her with an arrow. The boar, hearing her death squeals, charged through the forest in a frenzy until he found Purcell at the place where his mate had died. Purcell shot him in the jaw; the boar ran off and died in the wood. Purcell married the princess. He inherited the castle. The area where it stands is still called, in Irish, Luach Maigh - the field of the reward.

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Image: Santista1982 | Public domain

Loughmoe Castle: 1204: how the family really got the land

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The folktale is good. The historical record is more prosaic. In 1204 Sir Hugh Purcell received the lands of Loughmoe as a dowry on his marriage to Beatrix FitzWalter, daughter of Theobald FitzWalter - the same Theobald who had been made first Chief Butler of Ireland. The Butlers ...

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Image: Sarah777 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Loughmoe Castle: The architecture of a long dynasty

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irish Loughmoe castle, CC BY-SA 4.0. The oldest part of Loughmoe Castle is the four-storey tower house, built in the thirteenth century when the Purcells first took possession. In the seventeenth century, the family added a manor wing - a long range of more comfortable, less defensive rooms - turning the medieval ke...

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Image: Irish Loughmoe castle | CC BY-SA 4.0

Loughmoe Castle: The Purcells of the Jacobite cause

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kweedado2, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Purcells were Catholic when most of Ireland's gentry were quietly drifting Protestant, and they paid for it. The most prominent of the Jacobite-era Purcells was Nicholas Purcell of Loughmoe, born in 1651 (just after the Cromwellian conquest ended) and dying in 1722. Nicholas ...

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Image: Kweedado2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Loughmoe Castle: What Charlemagne has to do with it

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The Irish genealogist Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, working in the seventeenth century, traced the Purcell pedigree back to Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who died in 814. The claim was characteristic of the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman pedigree-makers, who frequently ex...

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Image: Sarah777 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Loughmoe Castle: The ruin in the field

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today Loughmoe Castle is a ruin in the open care of the Office of Public Works. You can walk up to it from the road - it is unlocked and unfenced - and look at the fireplace, the window seats, the spiral stair (no longer climbable after the 1980s for safety reasons). The interior...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Loughmoe Castle: The Cormack brothers' parish

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krochmal, CC BY-SA 3.0. Loughmore is the village beside the castle. It is a small parish but it carries a heavy nineteenth-century story: in 1858, two local brothers, Daniel and William Cormack, were hanged at Nenagh Prison for the murder of John Ellis, a land agent hated for evicting tenants. Most loca...

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Image: Krochmal | CC BY-SA 3.0