Rock of Dunamase

Dunamase was one of the landmarks shown on Ptolemy's map in the year 140. Excavations in the 1990s demonstrated that the rock, which rises 46 metres above the plain of County Laois, was first settled in the 9th century, when a hill fort, or dún, was built on it; the Irish name Dún Másc means the fort of Másc. In 845 the Vikings of Dublin attacked the site and killed Aed, son of Dub dá Chrích, abbot of Terryglass. There is no clear evidence of occupation through the 10th and 11th centuries.

The castle was built in the second half of the 12th century, and when the Normans arrived in Ireland in the late 12th century Dunamase became the most important Hiberno-Norman fortification in Laois. It was to Dunamase that Dermot Mac Morrough, King of Leinster, brought the wife of O'Rourke, King of Breifne, after kidnapping her. The O'Rourkes enlisted the help of the O'Connor clan, and together they drove Mac Morrough from the rock; he fled Ireland.

To buy the help he needed to regain his lands, Mac Morrough gave Dunamase in 1170 to the Norman conqueror Strongbow, along with his daughter Aoife in marriage. Strongbow came to Ireland with him and with many men to attack and recover Mac Morrough's territory, and the Norman invasion of Ireland followed.

Isabel, daughter and heir of Strongbow and Aoife, carried the castle by marriage into the Marshal family. William Marshal, later Regent of England during the minority of Henry III, had five sons, each of whom succeeded him in turn and each of whom died without issue, so in 1247 the Marshal lands were divided among his five daughters. Dunamase fell to Eva Marshal, and then to her daughter Maud, who was married to Roger Mortimer.

It remained in Mortimer hands until 1330, when another Roger Mortimer was executed for treason. By the time the family was rehabilitated the castle seems to have passed out of the area under Norman control, and to have become a ruinous shell by 1350.

From the 1400s until the 16th century the rock lay within the lands of the O'More family — Ó Mórdha, later Moore — who ruled County Laois for several hundred years. Rory O'More, Lord of Laois, owned the castle and famously resisted the English; the county is still nicknamed the O'Moore County.

Facing great opposition from the English during the Plantations, the O'Mores left Laois for Kildare, on land granted to them in 1574 by Elizabeth I — a move memorialised in Transplanted, a 19th-century poem by William O'Neill. The family name became Moore, and a marriage into the O'Ferrall family in 1751 produced the More O'Ferralls. Reduced from one of the most powerful Irish families to ordinary aristocrats, they declined a peerage in the 17th century and a baronetcy in the 19th, and retain the right to the Irish title Lord of Laois.

Dunamase played no part in the Cromwellian wars, but in 1650 it was slighted to prevent its being used. In the later 18th century Sir John Parnell began building a banqueting hall within the ruins, work that incorporated medieval architectural details taken from other sites in the area.