Bunratty Castle, County Clare, Ireland

Where Gumbo Was (#276)

We visited Bunratty as part of a day-long tour of western Ireland, starting from Dublin. My first reaction was to dismiss it as one more castle with one more noble family’s pictures, furniture and tales of glory. But no…

Bunratty Castle’s appearance makes no bones about its historic purpose; this is no Loire Valley Chateau dressed up in elegance. It’s a surprisingly compact, forbidding and seemingly impenetrable pile of stone designed for defense. Only one of our Gumbo regulars was able to identify it: George G., who used details of construction to narrow the field.

Inside and out, the decor is spartan, despite some beautiful and ancient pieces of furniture. Mod cons not included, at least in part because the last family that owned it moved out in 1804 to a newly-built mansion elsewhere on the property, and left part of the roof to fall in. It did a brief spell fifty years later as a constabulary post, before the rest of the roof collapsed.

The castle we see today, after restoration in the 1950s and 60s, was built around 1425 by the MacNamara family, but it’s actually the fourth version. The first was built of wood around 1251, but had disappeared by 1276 when the second was built of stone. Constant wars in that period led to cycles of build-and-burn before the present building was built.

That was hardly the end of the drama; wars and rebellions continued to swirl around it; at one point, during a particularly rough period, it was the headquarters of the English Admiral William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania. Eventually, he was forced to flee.

Today, the castle is open to visitors, and is surrounded by a living-history collection of buildings showing Irish country and village life in past centuries, mostly the 18th and 19th; that’s the Bunratty Folk Park. The castle also serves dinner nightly, with entertainment, to visitors, with service in one of the large rooms. The food, however, is not cooked in the castle’s old kitchens.

Tour introduction by day; medieval dining hall by night

The castle’s layout is as simple as its purpose. Each floor is basically one large room, with small alcoves for storage or private moments, and tight, narrow spiral staircases at the corners. The staircases are purposely difficult; they keep a swarm of invaders from getting upstairs with any speed or numbers.

Windows were not large, in part because glass was so expensive, and in part because a narrow space provided cover for archers and others to fire out without presenting a large target or permitting flaming buckets sent by catapult to get in.

Below, these figures were used as chan-deliers; they’re of German origin, called leuchterweibchen or ‘chandelier women.’