Qualla: Moydrum Castle

Moydrum Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adlo1981, CC BY-SA 4.0. Anton Corbijn arrived at Moydrum in 1984 with an infrared filter and the four members of U2. He posed them in front of the ruin, the brickwork dark behind them, the leaves around them ghosting pale because of the film. The result became the cover of The Unforgettable Fire - one of the most recognizable images in 1980s rock. Most people who bought the album did not know what they were looking at. The shell behind the band was a burned-out castle, gutted to its walls on the night of 3 July 1921, by neighbors who decided that the man who lived there was the wrong man to leave standing.

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Image: Adlo1981 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Moydrum Castle: How the Handcocks Came to Moydrum

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777, Public domain. The land was won in the seventeenth century, when the English Crown handed Westmeath estates to families who had been useful to Cromwell. The Handcocks came from Devon. By 1812 William Handcock had become the 1st Baron Castlemaine - a peerage promised to him in exchange for his v...

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Image: Sarah777 | Public domain

Moydrum Castle: The Night the Castle Burned

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit [Piotr Miskowicz], CC BY-SA 4.0. On 20 June 1921, Major-General Thomas Stanton Lambert was killed near Moydrum by an IRA flying column that had hoped to take him alive and exchange him for the captured General Sean Mac Eoin. In reprisal, the Black and Tans burned several farmsteads in south Westmeath. The local ...

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Image: [Piotr Miskowicz] | CC BY-SA 4.0

Moydrum Castle: The Photograph

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sixty-three years later, Anton Corbijn brought U2 to the ruin to shoot a sleeve. He used the same vantage point, the same polarizing filter, and the same infrared film as a 1980 photograph by Simon Marsden, from a book called In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland. The compos...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

Moydrum Castle: What the Land Did

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MissvainOriginal author: Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the burning, the Castlemaine lands were broken up by the Irish Land Commission, divided, and sold on to local farmers. The barony of 11,444 acres became hundreds of smaller holdings, the great estate dissolved into the working countryside of independent Ireland. The castle ...

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Image: MissvainOriginal author: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0