HISTORY OF DUNBOY CASTLE
The history of Dunboy Castle actually starts over 3,000 years ago.
Legend has it that the Gaelic tribes invaded Ireland sometime around 1500 BC.
According to legend, the O’Sullivan clan was the most senior tribe of all the Gaelic tribes of Ireland. O'Sullivan chiefs were the oldest son of the oldest son, all the way back to King Milesius of Spain, who sent a fleet of ships to take the island for his people.
Being the senior tribe, the ancestors of the O'Sullivan clan took the very fertile and temperate southern half of Ireland for their own kingdom. The colder and less hospitable northern half went to the descendants of a younger son of Milesius.
In the seventh century AD, about two thousand years after the Gaels arrived in Ireland, King Finghin died when his son, Seachnasagh, was too young to assume the throne and Finghin’s younger brother, Failbhe Flann, became king.
The senior descendants of Finghin never regained the throne, and they eventually became known as the O’Sullivan clan. The cadet (or junior) descendants of Failbhe Flann, continued to hold the crown and later became known as the McCarthy clan.
In 1169, the Normans invaded Ireland and began to wrest large tracts of land from the native Gaelic clans. At the time, the two dominant clans of southern Ireland were the McCarthys and the O’Sullivans. The O’Sullivans controlled the Golden Vale of Tipperary, which boasted the best farmland in all of Ireland.
The ancestral seat of the O’Sullivan clan was Knockgraffon Castle, the ruins of which are owned by the present hereditary chief.
Three years after the arrival of the Normans, King Henry II of England, visited Ireland. Dermot McCarthy, the contemporary Irish king, was the first Irish chief to bend his knee and submit to Henry, surrendering his Irish crown in return for an English noble title.
By 1192, despite treaties made between Henry II and Dermot McCarthy, the combined forces of the Normans and the O’Briens occupied the Golden Vale, forcing the entire O’Sullivan clan to be displaced. Donal Mor, the chief of the O’Sullivan clan at that time, escaped south to Raheen, a few miles southwest of Cork City.
Since Dermot McCarthy had essentially invited the Normans into their territory, many of the clansmen wanted to dethrone him and replace him with Donal Mor O’Sullivan, the most senior claimant to the throne.
In response to this threat, in 1214, Dermot McCarthy summoned Donal Mor O’Sullivan and all his sons to a banquet at his castle.
Donal Mor suspected that it may be a trap, so he instructed his youngest son, Giolla na bhFlann to stay behind and to guard his four-year-old grandson, Dunlong, who was the only son of Donal Mor’s oldest son, Giolla Mochoda, and the heir to the chieftainship of the clan.
Donal Mor’s suspicions proved to be correct, and Dermot McCarthy had him and his sons treacherously slaughtered at the banquet, eliminating the potential threat to his rule.
The entire O'Sullivan chiefly line, save two, were wiped out in one fell swoop. The present hereditary chief descends from the young boy, Dunlong, whose life had been saved by his grandfather’s intuition.
Giolla na bhFlann was good to his word, and he led the entire clan into the mountains of Cork and Kerry where they subjected the native tribes and became the overlords of the entire region.
Dunlong grew up to become the O’Sullivan Mor, chief of the entire clan, and lord of the peninsula of Iveragh, while Giolla na bhFlann and his descendants were awarded the Beara peninsula for themselves.
From Giolla na bhFlann descended the illustrious sept, the O’Sullivan Beare. In the 15th century, the O’Sullivan Beare built a well-fortified castle to defend the flourishing trade route between Gaelic Ireland and the rest of Europe overlooking the harbour of Berehaven and Bantry Bay. They named the castle Dunboy, meaning the fort of the buoy, and it soon became the primary residence of the chief of the sept.
Despite 400 years of intermittent war, the Normans were never able to completely conquer the Gaels. In fact, much to the chagrin of their English countrymen, the Normans eventually adopted all the customs and traditions of the Gaelic Irish and as one historian later commented, “The Normans became more Irish than the Irish themselves.”
One major uniting factor between the Normans and the Gaels was their mutual Catholic religion.
In 1601, Queen Elizabeth sent her Protestant army to Ireland to subjugate the rebellious Catholic Gaels and Normans once and for all.
At the Battle of Kinsale the united forces of the Gaels and the Normans were defeated, and Ireland officially became part of the British United Kingdom.
Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare, the chief of the O’Sullivan Beare sept, refused to surrender and continued to fight the English invaders. The Catholic king of Spain, Phillip III, sent him troops, arms, and money to support his rebellion against Queen Elizabeth.
On June 17, 1602, while Donal Cam was away to receive supplies from a Spanish galleon, British troops under the command of Sir George Carew laid siege to Dunboy Castle. The Irish fought fiercely but they were greatly outnumbered with only 143 Irish fighting against over 4,000 English troops.
Eventually the main tower of Dunboy was breached and the 54 Irish survivors were captured. Carew tortured the survivors for information but, when they refused to betray their chief, he had them all hanged in the market square of Castletownbere.
The remaining walls of Dunboy were destroyed by gunpowder. Carew later honored the Irish at Dunboy when he declared, “so obstinate and resolved defense had not been seen within the kingdom.”
With the destruction of Dunboy Castle, Donal Cam had nowhere to go other than to the castle of the friendly O’Rourke clan, about 500 kilometers to the north in Leitrim.
On New Years Eve, under cover of dark, Donal Cam marched out of Glengarriff Woods and led his 400 soldiers and 600 women and children toward Leitrim.
All along the way, after they had left Cork, this column was viciously attacked, from both English forces and traitorous Irish forces. The intent of the attacks would have been both military and opportunistic, as the slow-moving host would have been a ripe target for brigands as well as Carew and company.
Covering anywhere between 20 and 30 miles a day, O’Sullivan kept his people moving at a pace that was near murderous at times but was a result of their many enemies.
Of the thousand or so that set out, only 18 soldiers, 16 horseboys, one woman, and Donal Cam himself safely arrived at O’Rourke’s Castle. Just 36 of the group made it to the relative safety of the north, two weeks after they had set out. A few dribs and drabs, groups of two and three, would follow over the following days. The rest had died from starvation and the cold, been killed by the near ceaseless attacks, or had turned aside and sought their own end.
This great feat has been lauded by military historians all around the world. It is now known as “O’Sullivan’s March,” and it’s a cherished chapter in Ireland’s epic history.
The age of Gaelic Ascendancy in Ireland had come to a very brutal end.
Donal Cam subsequently escaped to Spain where he was reunited with his wife and children and warmly welcomed into the court of King Phillip III who ennobled him as the “Count of Berehaven.”
The ruins of Dunboy Castle and its demesne became the property of Donal Cam’s cousin, who had remained loyal to Queen Elizabeth. In the mid - 17th century, this branch of the O’Sullivan Beare sept built a single tower bastion fort which still stands today and is part of the present Dunboy Castle structure.
In the 18th century, Dunboy and its grounds were stolen by an English adventurer family named Puxley which became extremely wealthy by exploiting the copper mines in the area.
Over several generations, a magnificent gothic structure was built by the Puxleys at Dunboy, the cost of which eventually forced Henry Puxley to sell their local copper mines.
In 1872, the wife of Henry Puxley sadly died in childbirth in the castle and her heartbroken husband returned to England and never returned to his Irish property.
In 1922, the British army decided to use the abandoned estate as a barracks for troops sent from England to suppress the Irish War of Independence. To prevent this from happening, the Irish Republican Army burned down the castle by planting an incendiary bomb in the piano in the grand hall of Puxley Manor.
A fellow named Powers bought the ruins and the surrounding grounds at auction and it remained in his family until 2007.
In 2007, the present hereditary chief was informed that the Dunboy demesne and Puxley Manor ruins were up for sale for one million dollars. He immediately called Colin Powers, the owner, and told him he would take it. Mr. Powers advised him that he had already decided to sell the property to a consortium of Castletownbere businessmen with a plan to rebuild the ruins into a 6-star hotel complex. These investors were unanimous in their decision to rename the structure, Dunboy Castle, in honor of Donal Cam, his brave soldiers who died defending her, and the horrific sacrifices that the O’Sullivan clan suffered under the yolk of the British invaders. It was also noted that the new structure was rebuilt from rubble with Irish investment money, further justifying its new name.
Unfortunately, the American banking crisis forced the first group of Dunboy Castle developers into bankruptcy, after nearly rebuilding the entire structure, along with 72 additional bedrooms.
On the mouth of Bantry Bay, on the stunningly beautiful Beara peninsula of Ireland, once again stands the majestic Dunboy Castle, perpetually guarding one of the most scenic natural harbors in the world.
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