Clare Castle

Clare Castle stands in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, near the small village of Clare. It began as a plantation castle in the early 17th century when John Bourchier bought the manor and started building. His brother Henry took over and expanded the site, adding a large stone bawn and a three-storey house. By 1619 the bawn measured thirty metres long and twenty-four metres wide, with two corner towers. The house was still unfinished when the Irish Rebellion broke out in 1641. Rebels set fire to the castle and held settlers in a nearby mill. The castle’s story includes a dramatic fire in 1785 that destroyed the inhabited house. Thomas Leigh and Thomas Dawson were inside when flames took the roof and all contents. A child’s cries, possibly a ghostly echo from the 1641 troubles, woke the household in time to escape. Local accounts say Dawson risked his life to save papers before smoke overcame him. After the blaze the site returned to quiet farm use, and the bawn became a cowshed in the 20th century. Today visitors find a quiet ruin of Clare Castle beside farmland and country roads. The rectangular bawn walls still rise, their lime and stone showing the scale of the original fort. Two low flankers mark where corner towers once stood guard. The remains of the three-storey house lie inside, its gables open to the sky. The surrounding fields stretch away to the village, giving a sense of how the plantation estate once looked.