Doon
An Clochán, Co. Offaly

A crossroads in north-west Offaly where two tower-house ruins and a Georgian house mark a thousand years of the one family on the one ridge.

Doon is a townland and a crossroads in the north-west corner of Offaly, not a village in the sense of a street you can walk down. The Irish is An Clochán, the stepping-stones or the causeway. What pins the place down is a sandy esker ridge, and on it the ruin of Esker Castle - a three-storey tower house with a bawn, standing where the O Mooney family have been since Norman times.

The story here is the one family and the one ridge. In 1556 Rory O Mooney held the castle with something like ten thousand acres around it. The Mooneys hung on through every turn of Irish history that usually cleared families like them off the land, served as High Sheriffs of Offaly in the nineteenth century, and around 1800 walked across the road and built themselves a Georgian house - The Doon, three bays and two storeys with a limestone Doric portico - leaving the cold tower to fall in on itself. Both still stand, a few hundred metres apart, the medieval and the genteel looking at each other across the fields.

There is a second ruin a short way south, recorded on the old Ordnance maps as a monastery and known locally as such - the private religious house that went with the castle. Set the Sheela-na-gig carving on Esker Castle beside the chapel and you have the medieval landlord's full kit: a tower to hold the land, a church to mind the soul, and a fertility charm cut into the wall to cover the rest.

Do not come to Doon for a day out. It is a farming catchment with one pub, Martins, and a Gaelic football club, and that is the honest sum of its services. Come if you like castle ruins with nobody else at them, or if you are working your way to Clonmacnoise the slow way and want to see what the country around the great monastery actually looks like when no one is selling it to you.