Blarney Castle,
just five kilometers from Cork City,
is the site of the famous Blarney Stone, the legend of which suggests that
kissing it will grant one the gift of eloquence. The stone itself is set in the
wall below the battlements and to kiss it, one has to lean backwards while
holding on to an iron railing from the parapet walk. Be sure to get there early
before the tour busses.
The current Blarney Castle
is the third to have been erected on this site. The first, built in the tenth
century, was a wooden fortress. Around 1210 A.D. this was replaced by a stone
castle that had the entrance some twenty feet above the ground on the north
face. This building was demolished for foundations. In 1446 the third castle
was built by Dermot McCarthy, King of Munster of which the keep still remains
standing. The lower walls are fifteen feet, built with an angle tower by the
McCarthys of Muskerry. It was Cormac McCarthy who, as legend states, was
rewarded part of Scotland’s
Stone of Scone by King of Scots Robert the Bruce in gratitude for his help at
the Battle of Bannockburn. This stone became the Blarney Stone, so says the
story.
During Elizabeth I’s time, the Earl of Leicester was commanded to take
possession of the castle. But the McCarthy who held Blarney
at the time managed to delay the Earl long enough so that when he had to report
to his Queen that the castle was yet untaken, Elizabeth
referred to the report as ‘blarney.’ Thus the term means to deceive without
offending.
The castle was taken by Cromwell’s men. Some decades later, it came into the
possession of Sir James St. John Jefferyes, Governor of Cork. During the reign
of Queen Anne, Sir James St. John Jefferyes built a Georgian gothic house up
against the keep of the castle as was then the custom all over IrelanD.
At the same time the Jefferyes family laid out a landscape garden known as the
Rock Close with a remarkable collection of massive boulders and rocks arranged
around what seemed to have been druid remains from pre-historic times.
Certainly, many of the yew trees and evergreen oaks are extremely ancient. In
1820 the house was destroyed in a fire and the wings now form a picturesque
adjunct to the keep, recently in the 1980s rearranged to give a better view of
the keep. The Jefferyes intermarried in January 1846 with the Colthurst family.
Lady Colthurst decided to build the new castle in Scottish baronial style south
of the present keep, which was completed in 1874 and has been the family home
ever since. There are conducted tours of the house during the summer season.
One of the interesting features of Rock Close is a rock that looks like the
witch and her hat. There are also wishing steps which in order to obtain one's
wish must be negotiated down and up backwards with one's eyes shut! They lead
down to two dolmens, one of which used to rock if pushed in the present owner's
father's lifetime. They are said to have druidic connotations. There is a
sacrificial stone situated so when that the first rays of the sun shines
through gaps in the surrounding rocks, it is the appointed time for the
sacrifice.