Macroom Castle

The castle probably originated in King John's time, and its founders may have been the O'Flynns, the Carews or the Daltons; its old Irish name, Caisleán Uí Fhloinn, suggests it once belonged to the O'Flynns, who held much land in this part of Muskerry before the MacCarthys superseded them. In 1353 Muskerry — and Macroom with it — was given as an appanage to Dermot MacCarthy, 1st Lord of Muskerry, second son of Cormac MacCarthy Mor, King of Desmond, and his line held the castle until the middle of the seventeenth century. Teige MacCarthy, 11th Lord Muskerry, restored and enlarged it, and died there in 1565.

During Tyrone's Rebellion, after the Spanish had landed at Kinsale and been driven out again, it became known that Cormac MacDermot MacCarthy, 16th Lord of Muskerry, had been in secret communication with them. He was arrested on 18 August 1602 and escaped from prison in Cork City on 29 September. Government troops besieged Macroom Castle, first under Captain Flower and then under Charles Wilmot, who captured it by taking advantage of an accidental fire in the castle.

In 1645, during the Irish Confederate Wars, the Papal Nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini visited Macroom Castle, where Lady Muskerry and her eleven-year-old eldest son Charles received him while her husband, Donough MacCarty, 2nd Viscount Muskerry, was in Dublin negotiating with Ormond, the Lord Lieutenant.

In 1650, during the Cromwellian conquest, Boetius MacEgan, Bishop of Ross, assembled a Confederate army at the castle. When Lord Broghill's Cromwellian troops approached, the garrison set fire to the building before joining the bishop's army in the castle park. In the battle that followed, the bishop and Roche, the High Sheriff of Kerry, were taken prisoner: the sheriff was shot, while the bishop was offered his freedom if he could persuade the garrison of Carrigadrohid Castle to surrender. On arrival at Carrigadrohid he chose instead to exhort the garrison to hold on, and was hanged from a nearby tree. Later in the war General Ireton sent a troop that burned both the town and the castle.

In 1656, under the Commonwealth, the castle was given to Admiral William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania, who moved in that year. At the restoration of the monarchy it was returned to Donough MacCarty, now 1st Earl of Clancarty, who further enlarged and renovated it.

During the Williamite war Donough MacCarty, 4th Earl of Clancarty, turned Jacobite, and on 11 September 1689 Macroom Castle was put to use as a prison for Protestants evicted from Cork. In 1691 it was occupied by the Williamites, then besieged by the Jacobites until Major Percy Kirke came and relieved it. Confiscated that year, the castle was sold by auction in 1703 to the speculative Hollow Sword Blade Company, which resold it to Francis Bernard, later 1st Earl of Bandon.

By 1824 Macroom was owned jointly by Bandon and Robert Hedges Eyre, whose early nineteenth-century rebuild gave the castle most of its later form; the gatehouse on the town square and the Market House were both built before 1824 as part of a plan to embellish the town centre. Eyre died unmarried in 1840 and Macroom passed to William Hedges-White, who later succeeded his brother as 3rd Earl of Bantry. When the earl's daughter Olivia — born in the castle in 1850 — married Lord Ardilaun in 1871, the castle passed with her to the Ardilauns.

During the War of Independence the castle housed British Auxiliaries, who became the target of the Kilmichael ambush. On 18 August 1922, during the Civil War, anti-treaty forces burned the castle, one of many Irish country houses destroyed in those years. In 1924 Olivia, a descendant of the MacCarthy chiefs and by then Lord Ardilaun's widow, sold the castle demesne to a group of local businessmen, to be held in trust for the people of the town. The burnt-out main residential block, derelict and unstable, was entirely demolished in 1967.