Castle Salem started life as Benduff – Bhinn Dubh, ‘the black peak’ – a tower house built around 1470 in a wooded valley a mile north-west of Rosscarbery in County Cork. The name it carries now is the better story. After the Cromwellian wars the place came to William Morris, a Quaker, who renamed the old fortress Salem, for peace. Morris was a friend and the Cork agent of William Penn, the man who went on to found Pennsylvania, and Penn stayed here again and again through the spring of 1670 – the records have him at the castle on the 21st, 23rd, 24th and 25th of February, and on and off into April.
The tour
What makes Castle Salem worth your time is that you can get inside. It’s still a private home and a working farm – the Daly family have had it since 1895 – and the owner, Peter Daly, shows visitors round himself, for a donation. Actually walking into a genuine fifteenth-century tower house, rather than reading a sign outside a locked one, is rare in Ireland, and people tend to come away talking as much about Peter as about the stones.
One thing to sort before you set out: there are no fixed opening hours and no posted admission fee. This is somebody’s house. Ring ahead and arrange a time rather than turning up and hoping.
Benduff and the Black Lady
The tower was built by Catherine Fitzgerald, daughter of Thomas, 7th Earl of Desmond – the Earl who served as Viceroy of Ireland under Edward IV and was beheaded at Drogheda in 1466. Catherine is most likely the ‘Black Lady’ of the old Benduff legends. Her tower had walls eleven feet thick and once stood about seventy feet high, with a square central keep and three internal arches. In 1682 Morris’s son Fortunatus added a more liveable house onto the side of the medieval tower, and the family stayed on until the early 1800s. Dr Fitzgibbon bought the place in 1853 for £1,350; the Dalys bought it in 1895 and have farmed it ever since.
The Quaker thread runs right through the grounds. Halfway up the avenue is an old Friends’ burial ground, established in Morris’s day, to which funerals came from across the south of Ireland. The valley does the rest of the work: sheltered, once thick with trees, with a rookery still nesting in a grove of laurels – quiet in a way that suits the place’s second name.
Getting there
You’ll need a car; the castle is signposted off the N71 near Rosscarbery, and public transport out here is thin. Make a day of West Cork’s older stones while you’re at it – the recumbent stone circle at Drombeg is a short drive, Galley Head Lighthouse sits out on the coast nearby, and St Fachtna’s Cathedral is two minutes back down the road in Rosscarbery. But book Peter’s tour a few days ahead: that’s the part you came for.