1599 — the impregnable castle, impugned
Essex and the cannonball
Cahir was considered the strongest fortress in Ireland when the Earl of Essex arrived with 16,000 troops in May 1599. It fell in three days. The siege was something of a comedy — the largest cannon broke down on the first shot, a ball got stuck in the culverin barrel, and the east wall was only breached after about fifty rounds. The castle's garrison of perhaps forty surrendered. A cannonball fired during the siege is still visible, embedded in the wall of the Northeast Tower. Queen Elizabeth, unimpressed, dismissed the castle's defenders as 'a rabble of rogues'.
1650 — the bloodless surrender
Cromwell's polite letter
When Cromwell came to Cahir in 1650 he did not fire a shot. He sent a letter. It offered the garrison the right to march out with their arms, baggage and colours intact, and warned that refusal would mean 'the extremity usual in such cases.' The garrison had living memory of what Essex's guns had done to the east wall fifty years earlier. They handed over the keys. The castle survived intact — which is why it stands today as one of the best-preserved medieval fortresses in Ireland.
The castle on screen
Six hundred years of cinema
John Boorman chose Cahir Castle for Excalibur (1981) because he needed a castle where the river worked as a moat — Cahir gave him both, and the walls are the real thing, not a set. Stanley Kubrick shot scenes for Barry Lyndon (1975) in the castle's Great Hall and inner bailey. The tradition runs forward: A24's The Green Knight (2021) filmed here, and the castle won the EUFCN Best European Filming Location award for it. The stone is 800 years old. The film crews keep finding it.
A London architect on the Suir
The Nash cottage
Richard Butler, 1st Earl of Glengall, commissioned a pleasure cottage on his estate around 1810. He went to John Nash — the architect who was redesigning central London at the time. What Nash delivered was a cottage orné: thatched roof, asymmetrical windows, decorative bargeboards, and inside a graceful spiral staircase and wallpapers by Joseph Dufour, among the first commercially produced wallpapers in Paris. It was a place for picnics and entertainment, with no pretence of being a real house. The OPW restored it in the 1980s. Guided tours only — the interiors don't survive unsupervised crowds.
The cave that isn't in Mitchelstown
Mitchelstown Cave
Despite the name, Mitchelstown Cave is in County Tipperary, at Burncourt about 15km from Cahir off the M8. It was discovered in 1833 by a farmer quarrying for limestone. Inside: a cathedral-scale chamber, a 9-metre stalagmite column called the 'Tower of Babel', and an underground river. It is one of the major showcaves in Europe and almost nobody knows it's there. Guided tours run daily. The temperature underground is a constant 12°C.