Castle Hackett

The story of Castle Hackett

Castle Hackett stands at the foot of Knockma, the hill the fairies of Connacht are said to live under, on the road west from Tuam towards Belclare. The Hacketts, a Norman family, built it, and the castle historian Mike Salter thinks the original was a thirteenth-century hall house with its two top storeys added in the 1500s. By the end of that century it belonged to a Burke, Ullig McReamon.

The Kirwans, one of the fourteen tribes of Galway, bought the estate in the late seventeenth century; Sir John Kirwan had founded the Castlehacket branch of the family in the 1650s. They were still living in the tower in 1703 but gave it up during the eighteenth century for a new three-storey house nearby. That house, Castlehacket House, was burned in the Civil War in 1923, rebuilt, and in 2016 restored as a bed and breakfast; it is on Galway County Council's Record of Protected Structures. The tower itself is a ruin.

The castle has a place in Irish folklore out of proportion to its size. Introducing his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888, W. B. Yeats named the Hacketts of Castle Hacket as the Galway family favoured, or plagued, by the sight of fairies, and said they had a fairy among their ancestors. The hill above it, Knockma, was the palace of Finvarra, king of the Connacht fairies, and scenes from the 1969 film Alfred the Great were shot around castle and hill.

Written from Wikipedia, "Castle Hackett" and Wikipedia, "Tuam" (CC BY-SA 4.0, read 2026-09-18). Facts only from those sources; the words are ours.

Tower houses, the castles of the Irish countryside

Most of the castles around Tuam are tower houses rather than the great fortresses the word suggests: tall stone towers built from the later Middle Ages onward to be lived in as much as defended, commanding a crossing or a stretch of good land with a small household. They first appeared in Ireland, Scotland, England and the Frisian and north Spanish coasts in the High Middle Ages and spread from there; in Scotland's borders they were the peel towers, in Italy the city towers of feuding families. A good tower house has a vaulted floor against fire, a stone stair, corner bartizans to cover the walls, and a machicolation over the door for dropping things on whoever is knocking.

Written from Wikipedia, "Tower house" (CC BY-SA 4.0); the words are ours.

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