Barryscourt Castle, Cork

Newly armed with our OPW Heritage cards, we hastened to the next Heritage site on our route: Barryscourt Castle. The castle was the 16th century seat of the Anglo-Norman Barry family. The bawn wall (wall around the castle grounds) and the tower house are largely intact and the interior has been extensively restored.


The orchard has been restored to a 16th century design.

The garden within the bawn is a recreation of a 16th century herb garden.

I saw a number of roofs restored in this style and therefore so will you. However, I will only explain it once. There are very few original roofs remaining to inspire restorations like this one, partly because for quite a long time in Ireland's history there was a roof tax, whereby nobles who owned multiple properties were taxed per roof. To minimise their taxes the nobles therefore tended to burn the roofs off the castles they weren't actually residing in.

You may notice that the roof has something of the look of an inverted ship. In fact, the roofs of this type were built by specialist ship builders and faithful restorations, like this one, use the original methods. We visited one site where only original tools were used in the construction of the new roof. Imagine making something like this with a stone axe and hammer ...

The roof is made of Irish oak and holds itself up without the aid of metal or glue. Only wooden pegs are used in the construction. This is actually a good thing, because over many years Irish oak gradually releases an acid that will burn away metal nails and weaken the structure.

Inside Barryscourt Castle the stroll down memory lane continues. The vessels on the table are faithful recreations of what would have been commonplace items. The black jug on the right is made of leather and would have been used to hold ale, as would the wooden tankard in the centre. The black leather bag to the left held a kind of coarse brandy that was made in tiny clay stills. The smaller bag in the centre is a travelling version for the same purpose. Our tour guide expressed some amazement that anyone was able to function at all considering the rough alcohol they were drinking.

A period dining table is set up in the great hall, with pewter plates for the lord's family. The chair in the photograph above is of a very specific design made for Elisabeth Barry, the lady of the house. Most chairs of this period allowed space at the sides for the lady's voluminous gown to bulge out to the side. In the case of Elisabeth Barry the arms were also widened to accommodate a different kind of bulge. Poor Elisabeth was apparently perpetually pregnant from the age of 13 (married at 12) until she died (pregnant again) at the age of 38. In the days before personal hygiene, obstetricians or sanitation, when infant mortality rates were terrifyingly high, she produced 23 living children. Let your mouths drop open with awe. That's one surviving child every 13 months for 25 years. This woman was a machine. She had a lot more stamina than her husband, Lord Barry, who died after she'd produced only 15 of his children. Elisabeth, incredibly, then married another lord from down the road and had another 8 children with him.

An early baby walker is on display at the foot of Elisabeth's chair. It looks, spookily, rather like the one I had as a baby. There haven't been many leaps forward in baby walker technology in the last 4 or 5 hundred years.

Elisabeth Barry's procreational achievements are all the more astounding if you actually visit the castle. Like all the castles we visited the stairwells were all incredibly cramped and difficult to navigate. The height and depth of the steps is deliberately uneven, a defensive mechanism known as stumbling steps, designed to trip up invading enemies (and tourists). It's hard enough to navigate these stairs in good light, solid shoes and stone cold sober. Trying to do it heavily pregnant, in poor light and after a hard go at the dodgy liquor would have been positively life threatening. I'm confident that death by falling down stairs was a big contributor to the low life expectancy of even the upper classes.

Because of the impossibility of negotiating the stairs, Elisabeth would spend the last two months of each pregnancy confined to the bedroom.

The bed is very small, not long enough for even a shorty like me to lie flat. This is because they all had such horrible lung diseases that they had to sleep sitting up anyway. The relentless smoke inhalation from the fires, the damp from the unsealed windows and constant rains, the lime from the whitewashed walls and the pungent aroma of rotting rushes on the floors, not to mention all the other horrible medical risks of the era, kept all the residents in a fairly advanced state of ill health.

Fortunately this was quite a luxurious bedroom, about the size of my bedroom in Sydney, but with an en suite garderobe (toilet, literally "protect clothes"). I'm sure the ammonia rising off the lime sprinkled human excrement pooling below did nothing to improve the state of anyone's lungs, although it was rather useful for laundry purposes. Hanging clothes up in the loo overnight apparently so thoroughly immersed them in ammonia vapour that the lice keeled over and died.

Unfortunately, despite the private toilet, this bedroom would have been anything but peaceful, since Elisabeth had to share it with not only her husband, Lord Barry, but also their entire brood of children.

The baby (or babies) would be in a cradle in front of the fire to get the most warmth, and the most rich cloud of poisonous blue smoke blowing back in from the draughty and overlarge fireplace. The younger children slept on mats under the bed (note the space in the photograph above. This would have given them the most protection from the smoke, but the worst from the lice and rot from the rushes.

Older children slept in a loft near the ceiling. The loft is gone, but the post holes that supported it are still visible in the walls. The loft would, of course, have been almost as smoky as the baby's cradle as the smoke clouds gathered around the lungs of the young lordlings. It's amazing that any of them survived 28 days, let alone the 28 years average life expectancy for a male of the upper classes.

Poor Elisabeth's story reminded me of the horror of being born a woman throughout most of human history. I found it very difficult to speak civilly to any man for the remainder of the day.