County Clare

Clonroad Palace

Before the great stone castles there was Clonroad, an earthwork and stone fortress raised about the year 1200 on the River Fergus at Ennis. It was not built to impress visitors. It was built to hold a court.

For three and a half centuries it was the royal seat of the Gaelic Kings of Thomond, and the Dublin administration had no part in anything that happened there. Whatever was decided about Clare was decided at Clonroad.

In 1370, in a local war, King Brian Sreamhach O'Brien, called the Blear-eyed, beat the Anglo-Normans in the field and took Gerald FitzGerald, third Earl of Desmond, prisoner. He marched the earl back to Clonroad and kept him there for eighteen months. A rival lord held for a year and a half in a palace of earth and stone says more about the standing of the place than any surviving wall could.

The end came without a siege. After the 1543 surrender to Henry VIII the family had an earldom to keep up, and an earldom needed a seat that looked the part. The court moved to Bunratty. Clonroad was abandoned as a royal residence and left to the grass.

The cradle of the dynasty was given up not to an enemy but to a change of fashion in power.

The O'Brien Dynasty

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Clare Castle

The lowest crossing of the River Fergus was worth holding, and about the 1270s the Anglo-Norman lord Thomas de Clare put a castle of timber and stone above it. It was a shield as much as a bridgehead, covering the northern approach to his headquarters at Bunratty while he tried to carve a Norman colony out of Thomond.

The colony did not last. Norman power in Clare broke at Dysert O'Dea in 1318, and the O'Briens took the castle and rebuilt it in stone from the ground up. For more than two centuries the Kings of Thomond held it, charging merchant shipping heavily for passage and watching the southern door into their country.

The 1543 treaty confirmed it to the senior branch, the Earls of Thomond, and the castle changed character with them. As that line turned Protestant and English in its habits, Crown soldiers were quartered there to keep Ennis and the Catholic clans around it quiet.

Confederate forces took it in 1646. After the Cromwellian invasion it was besieged, taken again, and garrisoned by Parliamentarian troops under General Edmund Ludlow. Charles II restored it to the Protestant Earls, who kept it until their senior male line died out in 1741.

The Crown leased it after that and made a barracks of it. Several hundred infantry, two centuries of them, living inside walls raised to keep their kind out.

The O'Brien Dynasty

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Bunratty Castle

The site was Thomas de Clare's, an Anglo-Norman fortress commanding the Shannon estuary. Norman power in Clare broke at Dysert O'Dea in 1318, and the O'Briens took the ground and built on it again, in stone, on a scale nothing else in the county matched. The castle standing there dates from about 1353.

For two centuries it was the royal seat of the Kings of Thomond. The 1543 treaty with Henry VIII turned the kingship into the Earldom of Thomond, and Bunratty became the official residence of an English peer instead of a Gaelic king. The walls did not change. Everything behind them did.

Donough O'Brien, fourth Earl and remembered as the Great Earl, had been reared at the court of Elizabeth and had taken the Protestant faith wholly. In 1597 he remodelled Bunratty at great expense, putting classical Renaissance plasterwork on the interiors of a Gaelic stronghold. The phrase used of him afterwards was that he had made himself more English than Irish. He made the house match.

The Confederate Wars found the fifth Earl, Barnaby O'Brien, a Protestant Royalist besieged in his own castle by Catholic Confederates under Lord Muskerry. He surrendered it and left for England. His family recovered it and held it until the senior male line failed in 1741.

After that it was let to Protestant gentry, and then to nobody. The plasterwork came down with the roof.

The O'Brien Dynasty

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Lemenagh Castle

West along the road to Kilfenora, Lemenagh stands as two buildings in one. The older is a Gaelic tower house of five storeys in limestone, raised about 1480 by Turlough Donn O'Brien, King of Thomond, tall and narrow and built for defence. It guarded the southern mouth of the Burren.

The 1551 will of Murrough O'Brien cut it away from the Earldom of Thomond and gave it to his third son, Donough MacMurrough O'Brien. From that document came a third branch of the family, and Lemenagh was its seat for a hundred years.

The rest of the building came in 1648, added by the O'Brien chieftain Conor O'Brien, husband of Máire Rúa. A fortified manor house of three storeys and an attic, symmetrical and deliberate, with carved mullioned windows that let light into rooms of a kind that had always been dark and draughty.

A fortress learning to be a house. It had three years of peace.

Conor was shot dead by Ludlow's Parliamentary cavalry at the Pass of Inchicronan in 1651, and a Cromwellian garrison took the place. Máire Rúa rode to Limerick and married Cornet John Cooper, an officer of the men who had killed her husband, and by that marriage kept her son Donough's land out of the confiscation.

They had it back by 1660. Donough conformed to the Protestant faith in 1680 and moved the family to Dromoland five years later, and Lemenagh was left behind.

In 1902 Lucius William O'Brien, fifteenth Baron Inchiquin, took down its seventeenth century gatehouse and re-erected it at the walled gardens of Dromoland, where it stands yet. The house kept the doorway. The doorway went to the house.

The O'Brien Dynasty

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Inchiquin Castle

A stone tower house on the shore of Lake Inchiquin at Corofin, established about 1543, the same year the family traded a kingship for two titles. It became the seat of the senior cadet line under Murrough O'Brien, first Baron Inchiquin.

This branch kept the older ways. It stayed Catholic and stayed close to Gaelic custom while the main line at Bunratty was learning English manners, and for a hundred years that division was the family's insurance against whatever happened next.

Then came Murrough of the Burnings, first Earl of Inchiquin, who used the castle as a nominal base in the 1640s and 1650s. He had been raised Protestant to qualify for military office, and he fought for the King and then for Parliament and then against them again, burning as he went. His truce of 1648 brought the papal nuncio to excommunicate the Catholics who had signed with him. He ended the decade in France, a Catholic once more.

The castle did not outlast the man's usefulness for it. The Earls of Inchiquin, Protestant by then, moved their lives to Munster, to Dublin, to London, and by the late sixteen hundreds the tower on the lake was a ruin.

The branch that had held to the old faith longest left the least behind.

The O'Brien Dynasty

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Dromoland Castle

It began as an ordinary medieval tower house, built by local families in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, with nothing about it to suggest what it would become.

The 1551 will of Murrough O'Brien handed it to his third son alongside Lemenagh, and for well over a century it was the lesser of the two, a secondary estate on a branch of the family that was itself a branch. The lawsuits it generated gave it its other name, the Hill of Litigation.

Sir Donough O'Brien changed that. The son of Conor and Máire Rúa, he conformed to the Protestant faith in 1680, was created first Baronet in 1686, and in 1685 moved the family's permanent seat here from Lemenagh. The junior house had become the main one.

In 1835 the O'Briens pulled down the older building altogether and raised the present palace in its place, Gothic and baronial in dark blue limestone, a house built by people with no further intention of leaving.

They did not have to. The senior Earls of Thomond had died out in 1741 and the senior Earls of Inchiquin failed in 1855, and the Dromoland branch inherited the ancient Barony of Inchiquin. Three streams that had run apart for three hundred years came back together under one roof.

The family held it until 1962, when the estate was sold.

The O'Brien Dynasty

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Carrigaholt Castle

Out at the end of the Loop Head peninsula, where the Shannon meets the open Atlantic, a tower house was built about the 1580s. It belonged to a cadet branch of the Thomond line, the Viscounts Clare, and it stayed Catholic long after the senior family had found the advantages of conforming.

Its moment came in 1689. Daniel O'Brien, third Viscount Clare, made Carrigaholt his military headquarters and raised a cavalry regiment there for James II. Yellow-faced coats, drilled on the peninsula, and a name that outlived every man who wore them: Clare's Dragoons.

The Jacobite cause lost. After the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 the O'Briens of Clare were attainted and their estate of fifty-six thousand acres, Carrigaholt among it, passed to the Williamite Crown. Daniel O'Brien took his followers to France with the Wild Geese.

The senior branches had spent a hundred and fifty years learning how to keep land through conversion, litigation and well-judged marriage. This branch declined the lesson and lost everything in a single season.

The songs remembered the regiment. The Crown kept the acres.

The O'Brien Dynasty

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