Blarney Castle: The Stone, the Tower and the Making of Irish Eloquence

Most people know Blarney Castle for a single gesture: lying on your back at the top of a medieval tower, leaning out over a drop, and kissing a block of limestone in the hope of acquiring the gift of the gab. The gesture takes a few seconds. The castle behind it repays far more attention: a fifteenth-century MacCarthy stronghold whose story runs through Gaelic lordship, Elizabethan diplomacy, siege, confiscation, and more than two centuries of visitors drawn by a single word. On Odyssey’s Treasures of Ireland tour we reach Blarney on the fifth day, on the road from Dublin to Cork, after a morning at the Rock of Cashel.

Blarney Castle before the Blarney Stone

Blarney sits about eight kilometres north-west of Cork city, where the small River Martin cuts through wooded country towards the Lee. The castle stands on a limestone outcrop above the river, a position chosen for defence long before anyone thought of it as a place to visit. A timber structure is believed to have occupied the site before 1200, though nothing of it survives. Around 1210 it was replaced in stone.

The tower that dominates the grounds today belongs to the MacCarthys of Muskerry, a branch of the great MacCarthy dynasty whose main line had ruled the kingdom of Desmond in south-west Munster. The keep is traditionally dated to 1446 and credited to Cormac Láidir MacCarthy, Lord of Muskerry. The date comes from a Latin inscription on one of the machicolations, reported by nineteenth-century antiquarians, which was said to read Cormac Macarthy fortis me fieri facit AD 1446: “Cormac MacCarthy the strong caused me to be built.” Historians have noted that Cormac did not become lord until a few years after that date, so the inscription may mark the enlargement of an existing keep rather than a single campaign of building. Either way, the tower that rises about 27 metres above the outcrop is essentially his.

Cormac Láidir was a builder on a regional scale. He is credited with the castles at Kilcrea and Carrignamuck, and in 1465 he founded the Franciscan friary at Kilcrea. Blarney was the principal seat of a lordship that controlled a large part of mid-Cork for the next two centuries.

Tower houses and lordship in late medieval Ireland

To understand Blarney, it helps to see it as one of a type. Between the early fifteenth and the seventeenth century, several thousand tower houses were built across Ireland. They were the characteristic residence of a lord in a country where power was local, raiding was common and royal authority from Dublin was patchy at best. Gaelic chiefs and Anglo-Norman families built them alike. In 1429 the Dublin administration even offered a subsidy of ten pounds towards any tower built to defend the Pale, the English-controlled district around Dublin.

A tower house stacked its functions vertically. Storage and service rooms sat at the bottom, with living and reception rooms above, and the lord’s private chambers higher still. Walls were thick, windows small on the lower floors and larger higher up, where they were harder to reach. The entrance was guarded by a “murder hole” in the vault above, through which defenders could attack anyone who forced the door.

Blarney is a large and grand example of the form. Its most important defensive feature is the one visitors know without realising it: the machicolations that ring the top of the tower. These are openings in a parapet that projects out from the wall on stone brackets, so that defenders could drop stones or worse onto attackers at the foot of the walls without exposing themselves. The Blarney Stone is set into this parapet, and the gap you lean into to kiss it is precisely one of these openings. The ritual that draws visitors from across the world takes place inside a piece of fifteenth-century military engineering.

Siege, confiscation and new owners

The MacCarthys held Blarney through the upheavals of the sixteenth century, but the seventeenth was harder on them. During the Confederate Wars that followed the 1641 rising, the castle was besieged, and in 1646 it was taken by Parliamentarian forces under Lord Broghill. After the Restoration of Charles II it was returned to the family, whose head was by then Donough MacCarty, first Earl of Clancarty.

The family backed the losing side a second time. The fourth Earl of Clancarty supported James II in the Williamite War of the 1690s, was captured, and lost his estates, Blarney among them, to confiscation. The property passed through several hands, including briefly those of Sir Richard Pyne, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, before being bought early in the eighteenth century by Sir James St John Jefferyes, Governor of Cork.

The Jefferyes family built a house against the old keep and shaped the grounds around it. That house was largely destroyed by fire in 1820. In the mid-nineteenth century the Jefferyes line joined the Colthurst family by marriage, and in 1874 a new house, Blarney House, was built in the Scottish baronial style overlooking the lake. The Colthursts still own the estate. The medieval keep, meanwhile, was left as it is now: roofless at the top, largely bare inside, and all the more legible for it.

The Blarney Stone legend

The stone itself is a block of Carboniferous limestone built into the battlements below the parapet walk. It is the subject of so many origin stories that the stories have become part of the attraction.

One of the oldest involves Clíodhna, a goddess of the Munster otherworld. Cormac Láidir, facing a lawsuit, appealed to her for help. She told him to kiss the first stone he met on his way to court the next morning. He did, argued his case with an eloquence he had never had before, and won. In gratitude he set the stone into his castle.

Another tradition makes it a piece of the Stone of Scone, the coronation stone of the Scottish kings, supposedly given to a MacCarthy by Robert the Bruce in thanks for Munster soldiers who fought at Bannockburn in 1314. The story has a chronological problem: Edward I had carried the Stone of Scone off to Westminster in 1296, eighteen years before the battle. Other versions make it Jacob’s pillow, brought back from the Holy Land by crusaders.

Geology has since spoiled the more exotic theories. In 2014, geologists at the University of Glasgow examined the stone and concluded that the stone is local: limestone of the kind that underlies much of southern Ireland, laid down around 330 million years ago. That is a fitting result. The stone’s power, whatever it amounts to, was always a matter of story rather than origin.

How “blarney” entered the English language

The word is older than the custom of kissing the stone, and it came from politics. In the late sixteenth century, the Tudor crown was pressing Gaelic lords to surrender their lands and receive them back as grants from the Crown, a process that tied land tenure to loyalty. The MacCarthy lord of Blarney is said to have answered every demand with such courteous, plausible and endless delay that nothing was ever actually conceded. Queen Elizabeth I, the story goes, lost patience with the reports and dismissed the whole business as “Blarney.”

Whether or not the Queen said it, the word stuck. By 1785 Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was recording the stone and its reputation, and by the 1830s “blarney” meant smooth, flattering, persuasive talk. The Irish politician John O’Connor Power later drew the distinction well, describing blarney as “flattery sweetened by humour and flavoured by wit.” It is not quite lying and not quite sincerity, and it has been associated with Irish speech ever since.

How folklore becomes visitor culture

No one knows exactly when people began kissing the stone, but the custom appears to belong to the eighteenth century and was well established by the early nineteenth. Its reputation spread through print and song. The Groves of Blarney, a comic song by the Cork writer Richard Alfred Millikin from the 1790s, made the estate famous; in the 1830s Francis Sylvester Mahony, writing as “Father Prout,” added verses about the stone itself:

There is a stone there,
That whoever kisses,
Oh! he never misses
To grow eloquent.

Early kissers are said to have been held by the ankles and lowered over the edge. Today the method is gentler: you lie on your back on the parapet walk, take hold of iron bars fixed to the wall, and lean backwards and down into the opening while a member of staff supports you. Safety bars now span the drop beneath.

Blarney shows, in miniature, how a place becomes a destination. A defensive tower, a political joke and a local legend were drawn together by writers, songwriters and nineteenth-century travellers into a ritual that is now one of the most recognisable things a visitor can do in Ireland. The same instinct, turning a story into something performed and shared, runs through Irish culture more widely. In Kerry, the next stop on our route, the National Folk Theatre at Siamsa Tíre in Tralee has been putting rural song, dance and storytelling on stage since the 1970s.

How hard is the climb to the Blarney Stone?

It is the most physically demanding part of the visit: well over a hundred stone steps on a narrow, steep spiral stair, with no lift and no alternative route to the top. The stair is tight enough that people cannot easily pass one another, and on busy days the queue stands on the stair itself. Kissing the stone then means lying on your back and bending backwards and down, which some people find uncomfortable or dizzying. Travellers comfortable with the Treasures of Ireland tour’s Level 2 activity rating, which includes climbing and descending stairs, will generally manage the climb at their own pace.

Do you have to kiss the Blarney Stone?

Not at all, and plenty of visitors don’t. The climb alone takes you through the rooms of the keep and out onto the battlements, where the views over the grounds, the river valley and Blarney House are the real reward of the ascent. You can watch the ritual without taking part. And if the stair itself doesn’t appeal, the grounds offer more than enough to fill the visit at ground level.

Beyond the tower: the Rock Close and the gardens

Many visitors climb the keep, kiss the stone and leave, which means they miss the most atmospheric part of the estate. The Rock Close is a wooded glen below the castle, full of great mossy limestone boulders and ancient yews, with a stone circle, a “Witch’s Kitchen” in a rock shelter, and the Wishing Steps, a stepped descent through the rock. Tradition says a wish will come true if you walk down and back up them with your eyes closed without stopping. The Jefferyes family is credited with shaping the Rock Close in the eighteenth century, when landscape gardens across Britain and Ireland were being furnished with the romantic remains of an imagined druidic past. It is a garden about folklore, laid out by people who already understood that folklore brings visitors.

Elsewhere in the grounds, the Poison Garden grows toxic and medicinal plants inside iron cages, a sober reminder of the knowledge once held by every household that grew its own remedies. There are also a fernery, woodland and lakeside walks, and long herbaceous borders.

How long does a visit to Blarney Castle take?

Allow about an hour for the keep alone, from the base of the stair to the top and back down, longer if the queue is heavy. Seeing the Rock Close and the main gardens properly adds at least another hour. On the Treasures of Ireland tour, Blarney shares its day with the Rock of Cashel, so the time on site is shorter than a full day’s visit would allow.

When is Blarney Castle least crowded?

Mornings are quieter than afternoons, and spring and autumn are far quieter than July and August, when the queue for the stone can take hours. Treasures of Ireland departs in April and September, which places the Blarney visit outside the summer peak, when the grounds are at their best for walking and the stair is less congested.

Blarney in the Cork leg of the route

On the tour, Blarney belongs to a day that reads as a lesson in Munster power. The morning is spent at the Rock of Cashel, the ancient seat of the kings of Munster and later of its archbishops. Among its buildings is Cormac’s Chapel, the finest Romanesque church in Ireland, built in the 1120s and 1130s by Cormac Mac Carthaig, king of Desmond, an ancestor of the MacCarthys who later built Blarney. By the afternoon we are standing in the tower house of his descendants, three centuries on: the same dynasty, no longer kings, but still lords of their own country and still building in stone.

From Blarney it is a short drive into Cork, Ireland’s second city, where we spend the night before heading west into Kerry. For how this day fits into the whole clockwise journey, from Dublin and the Wicklow Mountains to the Giant’s Causeway and Belfast, see our 18-day Ireland and Northern Ireland itinerary.

Blarney is often treated as a quick stop for a famous kiss. It deserves better: a well-preserved tower house, a word that entered the language, and a garden built on the idea that stories draw people to places. That is what the Treasures of Ireland tour is built to do throughout, taking a small group of 6 to 14 travellers slowly enough around the island to understand what each place meant, and not only to see it.