Site of Ballymurphy Castle — Report the wrong picture

What is recorded here

No castle wall stands at Ballymurphy today because a bulldoer erased the last visible foundations in 1983. The lost tower belonged successively to the O’Loughlin, Prendergast and O’Brien families, changed hands again in the late eighteenth century, and decayed before surveyors marked only a small circular site on paper. That disappearance is not a flaw; it is the place’s final act. Under ordinary pasture, Ballymurphy becomes a castle remembered through absence, with people and events preserved only in the shapes once drawn around its vanished stone.

On a slight rise in a gently undulating plateau, with land sloping to the SW and a shallow ENE–WSW ravine to the N. In rough pasture within a large multiperiod field system (CL009-013001-). Depicted on the 1842 ed. of the OS 6-inch map as a small circular area (diam. c. 15m) defined by a broken line and labelled ‘Site of Ballymurphy Castle’. On the 1897 OS 25-inch plan it is shown as a hachured mound. Labelled ‘castle site (Ó Lochlainn)’ on Robinson’s map (1977). Referred to as ‘Ballemoroghee’ in 1574, it was the property of the O’Loughlin clan and may have been owned by the Prendergast family in 1601 (Ua Cróinín and Breen 1997). By 1619 it was in the possession of the O’Briens (ibid.). The castle went through several owners and occupants in the late eighteenth century and appears to have fallen into disrepair in around 1781 (ibid.). By 1839, the OS Letters recorded that only the foundations were visible (Comber 1997, 61). These were bulldozed away in 1983 (Sheehan 1982, 47). No visible remains of this castle survive. The following item has been uploaded: CL009-013004-_01.pdf Details from Risteárd Ua Cróinín and Martin Breen, The Castles and Tower-houses of Co. Clare (unpublished report). Uploaded courtesy of R. Ua Cróinín and M. Breen. Date of upload: 27 October 2021

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