The History of Fanningstown Castle

Fanningstown Castle is situated in the fertile valley of the river Maigue, in Co. Limerick. It lies in the barony of Coshma (Coshmagh) which, meaning 'Foot of the Plain' or 'Bank of the Maigue,' describes this location. The area of the barony coincides with the territory of the Celtic people, the Ui Cairbre Aobhdha. 

In the mid-seventeenth century English efforts to bring Ireland to heel were spear-headed by Oliver Cromwell's ferocious and successful military campaign. Planning to reward his soldiers with Irish land Cromwell ordered that a survey of who held what was made. It was completed in 1656 and called the Civil Survey. This reveals that Fanningstown had slipped from English control and was now in the possession of Edmund Fanning, a member of an old Anglo-Norman family that had remained Catholic and was vehemently opposed to Cromwell.

In Limerick City where Cromwell's general, Henry Ireton, had led a six-month siege, another member of the family, Dominick Fanning, an alderman, had led the resistance. By October 1651 Ireton had prevailed and Dominick Fanning was one of the twenty who were to loose 'lives and property.' He had escaped but returned to the city to retrieve some money. As his wife refused to receive him he hid in his ancestor's tomb in St Francis Abbey for three days and nights. Emerging to warm himself at a guard's fire he was identified by a former servant who denounced him to Ireton's soldiers.

One of the few remaining medieval houses in Limerick is Fanning's Castle, on Mary Street, a late medieval stone tower house, once five storeys high, with a turret staircase, ogee windows and battlements. This former residence of Dominick Fanning was one of the houses that lined the main street of English Town and so impressed foreign visitors. It is eloquent of the prominent position of a family that was supplying bailiffs and mayors for the city from the mid-fifteenth century until Cromwell's victory, when a new group of English Protestant families became dominant.

Anna Fanning, who died in 1634, is the only Fanning remembered in St Mary's Cathedral in the city; a stone slab on the floor of the chapel of St Nicholas and St Catherine bears her name.

 

Other landowners in the neighbourhood were investing in their properties. Two Limerick historians, Fitzgerald and Mcgreggor, present a picture of neat, well-kept houses and demesnes in 1826. Croom Castle stands out. John Croker had 'fitted it up and furnished [it] in the castellated style, with great taste and judgement. The gardens, shrubberies, and gravel walks are
kept in the neatest order, and from the house is a very fine view up the River Maigue which winds along in a majestic stream, and of a handsome Chinese bridge ...'

Adare too, where a classical mansion had been built in the eighteenth century, was acquiring a Gothic character. This project, started in 1832, was the preoccupation of successive Earls of Dunraven who employed a talented local stone mason, James Connolly, and various well-known
architects who specialised in the Gothic Revival. James Pain, A.W. Pugin, P.C. Hardwick. The result was a splendid mix of historicism and fantasy in which Irish double-stepped battlements rubbed shoulders with English towers and Romanesque doorways.

Elsewhere in Co. Limerick the Gothic style was also being vigorously pursued. At Castle Matrix near Rathkeale the Southwell family modernised a fifteenth-century keep in 1837, while at Castle Oliver the Misses Oliver-Gascoigne built a Gothic fantasy to give employment after the Famine in c 1850. At nearby Dromore in Pallaskenry, Lord Limerick commissioned E.W. Godwin in 1867 to design a castle based on a survey of old Irish castles.

So it is perhaps not surprising that (sometime between 1850 and 1865) Hamilton Jackson or his successor, David Vaneleur Roche, who acquired the property in 1860, should consider nearthing the Gothic potential at Fanningstown. He employed a Cork architect, P. Nagle, and together they
decided to demolish the eighteenth-century house, reconstruct the bawn walls, build a house along the entire east wall of the courtyard facing outwards and make a new entrance from Adare Road to the west.

At the corner opposite the old castle Nagle designed a three-storey tower serviced by a staircase (which may have been taken from the old tower) in a round tower which was a direct echo of the thirteenth-century building.
Between these two towers he erected a gateway with monumental double battlements and the battered (outward sloping) walls of the towers.

He reproduced a bartizan on the square tower (it forms a delightful cupboard in one of the bedrooms), introduced battlements to all the walls giving them the appearance of machicolations by projecting them on cut stone corbels (in medieval castles this would have formed a parapet through which missiles could be dropped on the enemy), and gave the ground floor windows and door on the entrance facade ogee windows.

The other windows were rectangular casements which, a nineteenth-century watercolour indicates, once had window frames of pointed arches. The old tower was made into a dove cot; the pigeon holes can still be seen. The result is a restrained nineteenth-century version of the medieval castle in which the integrity of the bawn and castle has been retained. This was an unusual solution, and gives this modest-sized castle a pleasing integrity.

Inside Nagle designed ogee arches above the window recesses in the thick walls, vaulted ceilings on the ground floor and Gothic fireplaces were acquired for the rooms. Despite some additions Fanningstown Castle retains much of the character of this nineteenth-century building in which the medieval past so easily seems to break through.

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