Qualla: Rathfarnham Castle

Rathfarnham Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iarla Byrne, CC BY-SA 4.0. Five-foot-thick walls and a square plan with a tower at each corner do not look like architecture - they look like a calculation. Build it like this, the geometry says, and your enemies will need cannon. Adam Loftus did the calculation around 1583, when he was Archbishop of Dublin and the surrounding Wicklow Mountains were full of Gaelic clans who occasionally remembered they had once owned this land. Seventeen years after the castle was finished it had to absorb its first attack. It did so successfully. Four centuries of sieges, sales, dairy farming and demolition threats later, Rathfarnham Castle still stands - rescued at the last possible moment by the Irish state, peeled back layer by careful layer in the conservation work that continues to this day.

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Image: Iarla Byrne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathfarnham Castle: An Archbishop's Calculation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amayuki, CC BY-SA 4.0. Rathfarnham was a 'waste village' when Loftus bought it - lands confiscated from the Eustace family of Baltinglass after they joined the Second Desmond Rebellion against the English Crown. The Pale, the English-administered hinterland of Dublin, ended somewhere near here, and the...

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Image: Amayuki | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathfarnham Castle: Three Times in Eight Years

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Höstblomma assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 3.0. The Irish Confederate Wars of 1641 to 1653 turned Rathfarnham into a possession that kept changing hands. English Royalist troops garrisoned it for six years. In 1647 the Royalist commander Ormonde surrendered Dublin to Parliament, and Parliamentary troops moved in. In the summer...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Höstblomma assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY 3.0

Rathfarnham Castle: Doric Columns and a Public Dairy

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pier Paolo Lisarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0. The eighteenth century gave Rathfarnham its great hall - a terrace, a portico of eight Doric columns, a dome painted in fresco with the signs of the Zodiac. Stained glass bore the Loftus arms; busts on coloured marble pedestals lined the walls. By 1723 the property had passed thr...

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Image: Pier Paolo Lisarelli | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathfarnham Castle: The Jesuit Seismograph

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Apm1987, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1913 the Jesuit Order bought the castle and the southwestern part of the estate; the east became the Castle Golf Club, the north became housing. The Jesuits used the building as a house of religious formation - tertianship, the final stage of Jesuit training. One of them, Fath...

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Image: Apm1987 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathfarnham Castle: Saved at the Last Moment

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1985 a developer called Delaware Properties bought the castle. The likely fate of a four-hundred-year-old building in a developer's hands was obvious to everyone in Rathfarnham. A public campaign followed - fierce enough that in 1987 the Irish state bought the building outrigh...

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