Carrigadrohid Caslte, Carrigadrohid, Co. Cork

The castle stands on a rocky outcrop in the River Lee, and where a garrison once looked down on a timber footbridge, the river itself has risen to meet the walls, a consequence of the Lee Valley being flooded for the hydroelectric scheme. What remains is a roofless T-plan tower, three storeys over a basement, its rubble stone walls still showing a subtle batter, or inward slope, towards the base, a design feature that helped tower houses resist both the weather and attempts at undermining. Square-headed, pointed arch and lancet windows puncture the walls at odd intervals, and on the north side one window still carries its carved limestone label moulding, a projecting drip-edge meant to throw off rainwater.

The castle was raised around 1450 by the McCarthys of Muskerry, who as Kings of Munster used it to control movement and trade along the Lee, a river that functioned as a working route rather than a boundary. Its history was not a settled one. The building was attacked repeatedly over the centuries, most notably by Cromwell's forces, and one episode has stayed attached to the site: Bishop Eagan, already a prisoner of Cromwell, is recorded as having urged the garrison to hold out, a stand that cost him his life. When the lands of Muskerry were surveyed in 1656, in preparation for redistribution after the war, the castle itself was noted as being in good repair and valued at £100, though the bridge beside it was then only a timber structure passable on foot. Quieter centuries followed. The Bowen family, ancestors of the writer Elizabeth Bowen, lived here afterwards, and the building remained occupied into the mid eighteenth century. Its later uses were far removed from its original purpose; in the twentieth century, the west part of the tower served as a handball alley, its thick stone walls making an accidental sports court.

Traces of that long working life are still visible on the stone itself, from the projecting machicolation on carved limestone corbels along the south wall, a feature that once allowed defenders to drop objects on anyone approaching the base, to the pointed arch doorway on the east side, now fitted with plain mesh wiring rather than a door. An inscribed limestone plaque survives on the east elevation, and on the north wall the outline of a blocked segmental arch opening hints at alterations made long after the tower was first built. A later rubble stone bridge, built to replace the timber crossing recorded in the seventeenth century, still runs against the castle's east side, tying the ruin to the water that now surrounds it on almost every other approach.