History Is Present

Blarney Castle

County Cork, Ireland

“Home of the Blarney Stone”

Blarney from the Sky

Have ever heard about the Blarney Stone? No? Why not? The Blarney Stone is said to be magical and grant anyone who kisses it good luck. The Stone is at Blarney Castle in my family’s home county of Cork.

Blarney’s History

The Blarney Castle that we see today is the actually the third castle to have been built. The first building was a 10th century was a wooden structure n was replaced around 1210 by a stone structure which had the entrance of twenty feet high on the north face. This building was demolished for foundations. In 1446 the third castle was built by Dermot McCarthy, King of Munster of which the keep still remains standing.

The castle was subsequently occupied at one time by Cormac McCarthy, King of Munster, who is said to have supplied four thousand men from Munster to supplement the forces of Robert the Bruce (the claimant to the Scottish crown) at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Legend has it that the Scottish King gave half of the Stone of Scone (now known as the Blarney Stone) to McCarthy in gratitude and was incorporated in the battlements.

Elizabeth 1st

The Earl of Leicester was commanded by Queen Elizabeth I to take possession of the castle. Whenever he endeavoured to negotiate the matter McCarthy always suggested a banquet or some other form of delay, so that when the Elizabeth asked for progress reports a long missive was sent, at the end of which the castle remained untaken and Elizabeth was said to be so irritated that she remarked that the earl's reports were all 'Blarney'.

The castle was eventually invested by Cromwell's General, Lord Broghill, who, planting a gun on Card Hill opposite and above the lake below the present mansion or new castle, succeeded in breaking the tower walls. However, when his men entered the keep, he found two old retainers; the main garrison had fled by the underground caves situated below the battlements known as the Badgers Caves. There are three passages, one to Cork, one to the lake and one seemingly to Kerry. At any rate, all had gone together with the reputed gold plate.

A subsequent owner of the estate endeavoured to drain the lake at the bottom of which the plate was supposed to have been thrown. The estate was forfeited by Donogh McCarthy, 4^th Earl of Clancarthy, who supported James II in the Williamite Wars, the property passed to the Hollow Sword Blade Company who subsequently sold it to Sir James St. John Jefferyes, Governor of Cork in 1688.

His son, by same the name, was Minister Plenipotentiary for England at the court of Charles Battle of Poltawa. He was rewarded with a full length portrait of the king and a ruby gilted sword which he subsequently sold to drain and improve all his land surrounding the castle. At the beginning of the eighteenth

Blarney at Night

century during the reign of Queen Anne, Sir James St. John Jefferyes built a Georgian gothic house up against the keep of the castle as was then the custom all over Ireland. At the same time the Jefferyes family laid out a landscape garden known as the Rock Close with a remarkable collection of massive boulders and rocks arranged around what seemed to have been druid remains from pre-historic times. Certainly, many of the yew trees and evergreen oaks are extremely ancient. In 1820 the house was accidently destroyed by fire and the wings now form a picturesque adjunct to the keep, recently in the 1980s rearranged to give a better view of the keep. The Jefferyes intermarried on 14th January 1846 with the Colthurst family of Ardrum, Inniscarra and Ballyvourney, Co. Cork, and Lucan, Co. Dublin. The early children dying, Lady Colthurst decided to build the new castle in Scottish baronial style south of the present keep. This was completed in 1874 and has been the family home ever since.

For more info go to http://www.blarneycastle.ie/