Granuaile's Castle

Located on a short, low promontory on the SE side of Clare Island, overlooking the modern harbour, which lies immediately to N. Before the piers were built, the castle would have dominated this sheltered anchorage, with its gently shelving sandy beach, which must always have been the safest landing place on the island.

This tower house is a National Monument (no. 198) in state ownership. As with the island itself, there are few references to the castle before AD 1800. The earliest record of its existence occurs in a list of O’Malley castles dating from 1574 (Knox 1908, 348). The next mention of it is in the Ordnance Survey Name Books (c. 1838): ‘the castle remained in good repair until about the year 1750 when it was allowed to decay and remained in ruin until about [the] year 1826, when it was again roofed and repaired (by Sir S. O’Mally), the owner of the island, and is now occupied by police’ (as quoted in Ó Muraíle 1999, n. 31, 113). This explains its labelling on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey maps as ‘Grania Wael’s Castle & Police Barracks’ (Ordnance Survey 1839).

Externally the tower house has a rather squat appearance, with bartizans on the NE and SW corners at first storey level. In plan it forms an irregular rectangle measuring 9.95-10.4m × 7.95-8.3m externally at ground level. The lower parts of the walls have an outward slope or batter from about first-floor level. Virtually all the opes were altered externally in the nineteenth century or earlier, and no crenellations survive on the parapets.

The bartizans are each supported on five massive corbels and project out an average of 0.40m from the wall faces at the NE corner and 0.55m at the SW corner. They are covered in small slates for weatherproofing, part of the early nineteenth-century restoration of the building, renewed in the 20th century.

The original entrance was near the N end of the E wall. Its original cut-stone surround was removed in the 19th century. Outside the doorway is a roofless lean-to porch of nineteenth-century date. Inside the entrance is a lobby in the thickness of the wall, from which, to the left, a narrow passage leads to the mural stairs. Straight ahead, an inner doorway leads to the ground-storey chamber. This doorway has also been widened and retains no original dressed stone.

The ground-floor chamber (6.1m × 4m; Wall T c. 2m thick) has opposed loops with wide, pointed arched embrasures in the N and S walls, and a small nineteenth-century fireplace in the W wall.

The passage leading to the stairs from the entrance lobby extends a short distance to W, after a right-angled bend, before ending. There is a small wall cupboard in this end wall and another in its southern wall. The stone stairs start above this end-wall almost at first-floor level. The first flight of stairs may originally have been in wood, although the walls of the passage show no evidence for a stairs in either stone or timber.

The entrance from the stairs to the first storey chamber is at the E end of its S wall and consists of a plain flat-headed doorway. Four large sockets in the northern and southern walls held the beams that supported the wooden floor. This was the main living room, with access from it to the small chambers in the bartizans and to a garderobe. At the W end of S wall of this chamber is a tall, arched recess like an embrasure, but without any external opening. A window embrasure in S end of the W wall has three steps leading up from floor level to its base: a doorway in its S side leads into the SW bartizan; the N side of the embrasure has been encroached upon to provide space for a small modern fireplace, and the flue from the fireplace on the ground storey. The interior of the bartizan measures roughly 1.8m ×1.8m and has a small rectangular window facing W. There is also evidence for a blocked-up gun loop set diagonally in the external corner.

The garderobe in the NW corner is at the end of a passage opening off the W side of an embrasure in the centre of the N wall. This embrasure has a small rectangular window, and the garderobe chamber itself has a tiny wall cupboard, as well as a small window in the W wall. Neither the garderobe chute nor its outlet are in evidence.

The NE bartizan (c. 2.1m by 2.1m) is accessed through a doorway set diagonally in the corner of the chamber with its base a few steps above level of the floor. A drawbar hole indicates that this door could be secured from inside the bartizan, which has one window in its E wall.

The stairs continue up through the S wall and at the top give access through a rectangular doorway to the SW corner of the second floor chamber. Two small windows in the S wall light the stairs, one at first floor level, the second at the top of the stairs. No evidence of the original second floor survives, only the small joist holes from the nineteenth-century floor. There are two windows in the N wall, both with low, flat-lintelled embrasures. The embrasure to the E has a cupboard in its E wall. There is a small nineteenth-century fireplace in the E wall and another wide, low, flat-headed embrasure at the E end of the S wall, with a window facing S and a narrowing extension eastwards ending in a small external loop.

The gables and chimneys are of nineteenth-century date, and it appears that many modifications were made to the original structure of this upper section at that time. There is a wall walk, 0.75m wide, between the gables and the parapet and along the top of the N and S walls. The parapet has been partially rebuilt. There are holes in the base of the parapet on all four sides to drain water from the roof in the medieval manner. This suggests that the original roof was hipped. The interior wall faces of the building show that it was generously plastered and lime-washed over the years.

Coupled with the shortage of historical documentation, the removal of virtually all of the original doors and windows in the early nineteenth century makes the dating of the castle’s construction difficult. However, the occurrence of bartizans and the lack of a vault would suggest a late date, probably in the early to mid-sixteenth century.

This is description is derived from Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning and John Waddell (eds.) New Survey of Clare Island Vol. 5: The Archaeology.