Ireland · Restored
Doonagore Castle
Caisleán Dhún na gCorr
Doonagore Castle is a cylindrical 16th-century tower house on a grassy coastal hill near Doolin in County Clare, Ireland. It stands within a small stone bawn and today is a privately owned holiday home restored in the 20th century.
First raised
1600
Its prime
1560
Today
Restored
As it stood in 1560
What Doonagore Castle looked like in its prime.
A cylindrical, multi-storey tower of grey-brown sandstone with narrow vertical windows set into the round wall. The tower rises from a low rectangular bawn of matching stone and has a projecting machicolation over the entrance; a crenellated parapet and a small conical cap with finial crown the top. The building sits alone on a windswept grassy hill with a simple path approaching and wide views over the Atlantic shoreline of Doolin Point.
Its story
The story of Doonagore Castle.
Tadhg O'Connor's Site and the Sandstone Tower
A castle was built on or near the site of an earlier ringfort at some point in the fourteenth century by Tadhg MacTurlough MacCon O'Connor. The round tower house that survives probably dates from the middle of the sixteenth century, and unlike most tower houses in the region it was built not of limestone but of sandstone, drawn from the quarry at Trá Leachain, Flaggy Beach, about two kilometres to the south-west. Some of its decorative features are carved from limestone.
Doonagore is sometimes reckoned to lie in the Burren, and is counted there as one of only three cylindrical tower houses, with Newtown Castle and Faunarooska near Fanore. The tower originally had four floors over a cellar, a beehive vault between the first and second, and a doorway covered by a machicolation reached from the wall walk, with a bawn wall running round it. The name may come from Dún na Gabhair, the fort of the rounded hills, or of the goats.
O'Briens, MacClancys and the Armada Wreck, 1570–1588
Sir Donald O'Brien held Doonagore in 1570, and Brian MacCahill O'Connor occupied it in 1582. Much of the property in the district was surrendered to the Crown in 1583 and regranted to Turlough O'Brien of Ennistymon, and the castle soon passed to the MacClancys, hereditary brehons — lawyers — to the O'Briens. In September 1588 a ship of the Spanish Armada was wrecked below the tower. The High Sheriff of Clare, Boetius Clancy, took a hundred and seventy survivors and hanged them at the castle or on the Iron Age barrow near Doolin still called Cnocán an Crochaire, Hangman's Hill.
Sarsfield, Gore and Le Clerc's Restoration
After the rebellion of 1641 Doonagore was granted to John Sarsfield in the Cromwellian settlement. The Gore family acquired it in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century — the source of the false etymology "Gore's Castle" — and repaired it early in the nineteenth, though by 1837 it had fallen back into disrepair. The architect Percy Le Clerc restored the tower in the 1970s for John C. Gorman, an Irish-American whose family owns it still. It remains a private holiday home, closed to visitors, and serves with a nearby higher radio mast as a navigational mark for boats making for Doolin Pier.
Step inside
7 places to explore in 1560.
The record describes 7 distinct spots at Doonagore Castle, including 2 interiors: cellar / ground-floor chamber, first-floor chamber with beehive vault. Create your own photoreal reconstruction and explore every one, more scenes means more rooms, more angles, and more of the place to stand in.
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Recreate Doonagore Castle with AI to explore it.
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Clans who held Doonagore Castle.
The families that held Doonagore Castle for a decade or more across its history, follow a name to its clan.
Owned in 1570 by Sir Donald O'Brien of the O'Brien dynasty.
MacClancy
Held by the MacClancys (Clancys), hereditary brehons of the O'Briens.
Gore
Gore property from the late 17th or early 18th century, source of the false etymology "Gore's Castle".
Gorman
Owned by the Gorman family to this day.
