One of many oldest repeatedly occupied websites in Eire, County Cork’s Blackwater Citadel has a historical past courting again millennia. Constructed because the fortress of Dún Crúadha, a lot of its historical past is about down within the Ebook of Fermoy, a Fifteenth-century manuscript in Dublin’s Royal Irish Academy.
It paperwork the Roche household, who occupied the fortress from 1100 to 1666. Sir Walter Raleigh captured the fortress in 1580, and Oliver Cromwell laid siege to Blackwater in 1649. Under the fortress, close to the River Awbeg is the Holy Nicely of St. Patrick.
Blackwater’s architectural options embrace a Twelfth-century spherical tower, watchtowers, and battlements. The Norman tower hold, constructed within the mid-Fifteenth century, is especially intact with the bottom and two predominant flooring, the roof and spiral staircase all in outstanding situation.
The hold retains the usual options to fend off attackers: uneven steps (journey steps), a homicide gap (to rain unpleasantness on unwelcome guests), sloping batter partitions, and an overhanging privy room, or garderobe.
At present, the fortress is a non-public house and an unique hospitality venue. Its 9 suites welcome as much as 23 individuals throughout the primary and second flooring. Its six reception rooms embrace a breakfast room, eating room, tearoom, a bar lounge, a piano room, and library, all served by a spacious, absolutely geared up business kitchen.
Mature woodland surrounds the imposing fortress and its courtyard and walled backyard. The grounds prolong to greater than 60 acres and embrace broad lawns, orchards, fruit and vegetable gardens, and a greenhouse. The River Awbeg flows by way of the property and supplies 1 km of personal double-bank fishing rights.