A castle you can actually go into
Most of West Cork’s tower houses are roofless shells. Dunasead is the exception: the McCarthy family spent eight years from 1997 rebuilding it from ruin, and they live in it, which is why you can walk through a furnished great hall and climb to the battlements rather than pick your way around fallen stone. It stands on a sandstone ridge right on Baltimore’s square, a two-storey fortified house – its Irish name, Dún na Séad, means ‘fort of the jewels’ – looking out over the harbour to Sherkin Island.
The O’Driscolls and eight centuries of history
There was a stronghold here long before the present walls. The ridge held a Bronze Age ringfort, then a Norman-era structure, and around 1215 an Anglo-Norman settler – named in the sources as Sleynie, or FitzStephen – raised a stone tower and bawn to command the harbour. After the tower was destroyed in a feud in 1305, the site passed to the O’Driscolls, a seafaring clan who ran much of the Roaringwater Bay coast.
For the O’Driscolls the castle was a base for trade, customs and, when royal authority felt far enough away, a bit of piracy. Their long rivalry with the merchants of Waterford ended in a sack of the castle in 1537. The Atlantic trade is there in the ground: restoration digs turned up 12th to 14th-century pottery from Saintonge in south-west France, and a feast recorded here in 1413 is one of the earliest written references to dancing in Ireland. Spanish troops held the castle briefly in 1601, and it sheltered English planters in the Confederate Wars before Cromwell’s forces took it and left it to fall into ruin. The village below has its own dark date: in 1631 Barbary corsairs raided Baltimore and carried off more than 100 people to slavery in North Africa, the only such raid on Irish soil.
The castle sat as a ruin until 1997, when the McCarthy family began the restoration – guided by the archaeology and using lime mortars and green oak – that opened it to visitors from 2005. It’s a National Monument, and a home.
What to see
The ground and first floors are open, with period furnishings, archaeological finds and the two original sandstone fireplaces on the ground floor. The thing to make for is the roof: the battlements and the small bartizan on the south-west corner give the view the O’Driscolls built here for, straight out over Baltimore Harbour to Sherkin Island and the open Atlantic. A low bawn wall still rings the tower, a reminder this was a fortified house rather than a full military castle.
Away from the stones, the castle runs guided heritage walking tours of Baltimore village – the O’Driscolls, the pirate raid, the fishing story – starting and ending at the door, and it hires out as a wedding and events venue.
Practical information
- Opening hours: daily, 1 April to 31 October, 10:00–17:00. Check the website outside those dates.
- Admission: adults €6, OAP and students €6, children free with an adult.
- Parking: free parking near the castle, though it fills on peak summer weekends.
- Accessibility: a ramp reaches the ground-floor rooms, but the great hall and battlements mean stairs and uneven surfaces, so they aren’t suitable for wheelchairs or pushchairs.
- Contact: +353 (0)28 20735 or baltimorecastle.ie.
It’s a small site and a short visit – reckon on half an hour to forty minutes inside – so it works best stitched into a Roaringwater Bay day. Baltimore is on the R595 from Skibbereen; from the square, a short walk north brings you to the Baltimore Beacon, and the ferry from the harbour runs across to Sherkin Island. Come early in the day and you’ll get the battlements, and the best of the light, to yourself.