Condons, then Roches, Lords of Fermoy
The castle on the rock
The Condon family, Normans who reached the Cork area in the 12th century, built the first castle on the rocky outcrop above the Funshion. By about 1300 it had passed to the Roche family, styled Lords of Fermoy, who held Glanworth for much of the medieval period. The keep and a length of curtain wall survive on the rock, looking down on the mill and the bridge. It is a state-cared site and now mostly used as a public walk - free, open, and rarely busy. Approach it from the river side for the angle that makes the whole thing read.
Leaba Chaillí, c. 2300 BC, the largest wedge tomb in Ireland
Labbacallee, the Hag's Bed
Two kilometres southeast of the village, in a field signposted off the road, stands Labbacallee - the largest wedge tomb in Ireland, dated to roughly 2300 BC. Three massive capstones, the heaviest around ten tonnes, sit on a long chamber divided by a vertical slab into two sealed burial spaces. It was the first megalithic tomb in the country to be described by an antiquarian, in John Aubrey's manuscript of 1693, and one of the first excavated under the National Monuments Act, by Harold Leask and Liam Price in 1934. The name, the Hag's Bed, ties it to the Cailleach of older Irish tradition. Wear boots; it is a field, not a car park.
Dominicans 1475, the bridge mid-1600s
The friary and the bridge
The Roches of the castle invited the Dominicans to Glanworth in 1475 to found a friary dedicated to the Holy Cross. It ran for barely two generations before the Dissolution of the Monasteries closed it in 1541; the ruin sits among the village houses, and its fine east window - removed in the 19th century to the Church of Ireland church - was later restored to its original place. The 13-arch bridge below the castle dates from the mid-17th century, and is one of the oldest of its kind still standing in the region. Narrow enough that traffic takes it one car at a time.