Blarney Castle

A timber house is believed to have stood on the site before 1200, though no evidence of it remains, and around 1210 a stone fortification took its place. That building was destroyed in 1446 and rebuilt by Cormac Láidir MacCarthy, Lord of Muskerry, whose line was a cadet branch of the MacCarthy kings of Desmond. Blarney was not his only commission: he also built the castles at Kilcrea and Carrignamuck.

Blarney was besieged during the Irish Confederate Wars and seized in 1646 by Parliamentarian forces under Lord Broghill. The MacCarthys got it back after the Restoration, when the castle was returned to Donough MacCarty, made 1st Earl of Clancarty. The recovery did not outlast the century. During the Williamite War of the 1690s the 4th Earl - another Donough MacCarty - was captured and his lands, Blarney among them, were confiscated by the Williamites.

The castle was sold and changed hands several times, Sir Richard Pyne, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, holding it briefly, before Sir James Jeffreys, governor of Cork City, bought it in the early 18th century. His family later built a large house near the 15th-century keep; it was destroyed by fire, and in 1874 a replacement, Blarney House, went up overlooking the nearby lake, in Scottish baronial style, to designs by John Lanyon of Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon. A mid-19th-century marriage joined the Jefferyes and Colthurst families, and the Colthursts occupy the demesne still.

The Blarney Stone sits among the machicolations at the top of the castle, and visitors kiss it by hanging upside-down over a sheer drop; the reward, it is said, is the gift of eloquence. Where the stone came from is told many ways - one version claims it is the Lia Fáil, the numinous stone on which Irish kings were crowned. The castle around it is now a partial ruin, with some rooms and battlements accessible.