Armorial plaque (present location), Rochfordstown, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Estate Features
Mortared into the wall of a nineteenth-century stable in County Cork is a carved stone plaque that has no particular business being there.
It bears the date 1630, a coat of arms, and the quiet remnants of a social world that has otherwise almost entirely disappeared from this stretch of East Cork.
The plaque carries the impaled arms of Sir Robert Travers and his wife Elizabeth Boyle. In heraldry, impalement is the practice of combining two coats of arms side by side on a single shield to represent a married couple, and this example would originally have been associated with a castle whose ruins lie roughly eighty-five metres to the north-west. The Boyle connection is significant: Elizabeth was almost certainly from the wider family of Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, whose influence over Munster in the early seventeenth century was enormous. The date 1630 places the plaque squarely within that era of New English settlement and the building programmes that accompanied it, when carved armorial displays of this kind were a way of asserting lineage, ownership, and status on newly consolidated estates. At some point, the plaque was removed from its original context, possibly when the castle fell out of use, and found its way onto the stable wall, which forms part of the farm buildings of Castlewhite House.