Why Ballyportry Castle is one of the most
interesting places to stay in Ireland?
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Ballyportry
Castle located at the edge of the finest surviving archaeological and most
interesting botanical and geological landscape in the west of Ireland.
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It is one
of the best restored Gaelic tower houses in the country and the most intact
that is offered for rental.
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Fullest
evocation of late 15th century castle atmosphere of any Irish
buildings.
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Home of
the late medieval Gaelic chieftains, the O’Brien’s, who sprung from an ancient
Celtic sept whose most famous king, Brian Boru was High King of Ireland.
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Ballyportry
is almost half a century older than Trinity College, Dublin. It was built in
the decade of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas.
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Interesting
Times: The late 15th century Gaelic chiefs would have lived lives of
privilege, culture, politics and warfare. It was a time of shifting political
alliances.
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Next
year, 2014 will be a year of remembering Brian Boru as it will be 1000 years
since the most famous battle in Irish history when he was the leader of the
Irish forces against the Vikings. He decisively defeated the Vikings at the
bloody battle of Clontarf at which he lost his life.
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Restored
by the American architect Bob Brown who, although without obvious Irish roots,
fell in love with Ireland and it’s castles in the late 1960s.
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Sympathetic
restoration and subsequent researched conservation programmes have achieved the
best example of medieval stone building conservation anywhere in Ireland.
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Ballyportry
Castle is between Kerry and Connemara, and inland from Galway Bay. It is beside
the Burren National Park. County Clare is a peninsula surrounded by the
Atlantic Ocean, which is about 45 minutes away by car from Ballyportry Castle.
