Blarney Castle

Eight kilometres up the road from the city stands the most famous castle in Ireland, and the only one that put a word into the English language. Blarney was a MacCarthy stronghold for centuries, and the keep you climb today went up in 1446. Set high in its battlements is a lump of limestone that people fly across the world to kiss, hanging backwards over a drop with a stranger holding their belt. Half of them have no idea why. This is why.

The MacCarthys' tower

There was a timber fort on the rock before 1200 and a stone one from about 1210. The tower standing now is the third castle on the site, built in 1446 by Cormac Láidir MacCarthy, Lord of Muskerry, whose family were a branch of the old Kings of Desmond. While English Cork grew on its marsh downriver behind a wall, the MacCarthys held the hills and the river valleys from towers like this one, and Blarney was the best of them. The walls are five and a half metres thick at the base. Nobody built like that for show. This was a working fortress with a watchful, well-armed family inside it, and the merchants of Cork paid it a great deal of attention.

How "blarney" got its meaning

The word comes from a duel of letters. Queen Elizabeth I wanted the Irish lords to surrender their lands and take them back under English title, on her terms. Cormac Teige MacCarthy, the Lord of Blarney in her day, answered every royal demand with warm promises of loyalty, elaborate excuses and not one inch of actual ground. The Queen, worn down by another beautifully worded refusal, is said to have thrown the letter down and snapped that it was all "blarney". The name of his castle became the word for talk that flatters, charms and never quite says yes. Cork people have been living up to it ever since.

The stone itself carries older stories. One says the goddess Clíodhna told Cormac Láidir to kiss the first stone he found on his way to court, and he won his case with sudden eloquence. Another claims Robert the Bruce sent a piece of the Stone of Scone in 1314 as thanks for Irish help at Bannockburn. Whatever the truth, the tradition holds that kissing it gives you the gift of the gab, and millions have gone up the narrow spiral stair to lie on their backs, grip the iron rails, and lean out over the drop to collect it. Victorians did it with a friend holding their ankles. There are rails and an attendant now, which takes some of the sport out of it.

After the MacCarthys

The MacCarthys lost Blarney for good in the Williamite wars of the 1690s, the same war that broke the walls of Cork, and the estate passed to the Jefferyes family. It was the Jefferyes who turned the grounds into the strange and lovely place they are now. In the 1750s they laid out Rock Close, a garden built around the boulders and old yews of the hillside, with a Druid's circle, a dolmen, a witch's kitchen and a set of Wishing Steps you are meant to walk down and back up with your eyes shut. Some of the stones are older than the castle. The rest is eighteenth-century theatre, and it works. Today the castle sits in sixty acres of gardens, and the village at its gate grew up around one of the great woollen mills of Ireland.

Getting there from the city is easy. It is a fifteen-minute drive or a short hop on the 215 bus from the centre, and the castle opens most days of the year. Go early if you can. By late morning in summer the queue for the stone snakes along the battlements, and you will have time to read every word on this page twice before your turn.

On the walk

The tour tells the other half of this story: the walled English city on the marsh that the MacCarthys watched from their towers. Many guests pair the morning walk with an afternoon at Blarney, and we are happy to tell you the quickest way out there.