Caherkinmonwee Castle, also known as Caher Castle, is a

tower house A tower house is a particular type of stone structure, built for defensive purposes as well as habitation. Tower houses began to appear in the Middle Ages, especially in mountainous or limited access areas, to command and defend strategic points ...

located in

County Galway County Galway ( ; ) is a Counties of Ireland, county in Republic of Ireland, Ireland. It is in the Northern and Western Region, taking up the south of the Provinces of Ireland, province of Connacht. The county population was 276,451 at the 20 ...

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

Location

Caherkinmonwee Castle is southeast of

Athenry Athenry (; ) is a town in County Galway, Ireland, which lies east of Galway city. Some of the attractions of the medieval town are its town wall, Athenry Castle, its priory and its 13th-century street-plan. The town is also well known by virt ...

, on the north bank of the Dunkellin River.

History

The tower house was built some time in the 15th century. In 1574 it was held by Myler Henry Burke. According to the School's Collection, a stone weighing was blown off the top of the castle on the

Night of the Big Wind The Night of the Big Wind () was a powerful European windstorm that swept across what was then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, beginning on the afternoon of 6 January 1839, causing severe damage to property and several hundred d ...

(1839); it landed on an iron gate away and crushed it. It was in ruins for two centuries until 1996, when stonemason and artisan Peter Hayes purchased and renovated it; he still lives there with his partner and children. It is now available as an

Airbnb Airbnb, Inc. ( , an abbreviation of its original name, "Air Bed and Breakfast") is an American company operating an online marketplace for short-and-long-term homestays, experiences and services in various countries and regions. It acts as a ...

rental, with the castle's master bedroom described as the most popular room on the website.

Description

The tower house is well-preserved and stands five storeys tall, with

bartizan A bartizan (an alteration of ''bratticing''), also called a guerite, ''garita'', or ''échauguette'', or spelled bartisan, is an overhanging turret projecting from the walls of late-medieval and early-modern fortifications from the early 14th c ...

s on each corner and a

spiral staircase Stairs are a structure designed to bridge a large vertical direction, vertical distance between lower and higher levels by dividing it into smaller vertical distances. This is achieved as a diagonal series of horizontal platforms called steps wh ...

in the southeast. It has

machicolation In architecture, a machicolation () is an opening between the supporting corbels of a battlement through which defenders could target attackers who had reached the base of the defensive wall. A smaller related structure that only protects key ...

and Irish crenellations. The new roof was built with local

oak An oak is a hardwood tree or shrub in the genus ''Quercus'' of the beech family. They have spirally arranged leaves, often with lobed edges, and a nut called an acorn, borne within a cup. The genus is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisp ...

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

and no nails.

References

{{Reflist Castles in County Galway 15th-century establishments in Ireland Tower houses in the Republic of Ireland