May 01, 2007

A very brief history of Castle Waller

The site of Castle Waller dates back to the Iron Age 3,000 years ago. The castle is situated near one of three Ring Forts in the Lands of Cully, seven miles upstream from the Shannon in the foothills of Keeper Hill.
Centuries later the O’Mubrians, ancestors of the Ryan clan, built it into a rough stone castle, and by the 15th century it was a fine Tower House for the local lord.
English invaders under Oliver Cromwell attacked and significantly damaged the tower house during the subjugation of Ireland in the mid 1600s. Lt. Richard Waller, a young officer in Cromwell’s army, received the castle as booty and began to repair and enlarge it. The Waller family doubled the size of the castle with a crenellated neo-gothic addition three stories high, rounded on the west side and octagonal on the east. The additions adjoined the Tower House and a complex of great stone barns; high walls with round watch towers encircled the entire castle yard and orchard. 
But the Great Famine and spendthrift ways forced the family to sell at auction in 1851. Two generations later the castle lay in ruins. By the mid 20th century, the Tower House and other buildings were demolished and used as stone quarries.
The Tower House is now erased from the land; the neo-gothic palace now a shattered half-shell. [Note in May 2010: A recent visit to the castle shows that the remaining neo-gothic wall had collapsed since an earlier visit.] The only functioning remains are the outer walls with their broken towers and faint traces of grandeur, the vaulted stone dungeons, now sealed; and a tiny stone cottage where Mrs. Norah Ryan raised her 16 children.
Now Norah Ryan too is gone. She told us more than twenty years ago that her 16 children were no longer in Ireland.