Rock of Cashel

The story everybody tells here is that St Patrick, baptising the King of Munster on this outcrop, drove the sharp point of his crozier straight through the king's foot into the ground, and that the king — Óengus mac Nad Froích, baptised along with the grandsons of Conall Corc — said nothing at all, assuming the pain was part of it. It is that sort of place. A limestone crag standing up out of the flat Golden Vale, with thirteen hundred years of Irish royal and church history piled onto the top of it, and a good many of the things people confidently say about it turn out not to be true.

Kings first, clergy second

Caiseal means stone fort, and that is what this was. The Rock emerged as a centre of power in the late fourth or early fifth century, when the Eóganacht became kings of Munster; Conall Corc is their traditional founder here. One oddity of the Cashel kingship is that a striking number of its kings were also churchmen. (The other story about the Rock's origin is that St Patrick banished the devil from a mountain called the Devil's Bit, thirty kilometres north, and the bite Satan took out of it on his way past landed here. You can see the notch in the Devil's Bit from the road. It fits.)

By the late tenth century the Dál Cais of Killaloe had pushed the Eóganacht out. Brian Boru succeeded his brother as king of Cashel in 978, made it his capital, went on to become the first Munster king to take the high kingship of Ireland, and died at Clontarf in 1014.

Then, in 1101, Brian Boru's great-grandson Muircheartach Ua Briain gave the Rock to the Church. This is usually told as piety. It was a masterstroke of politics. It made him a church reformer at exactly the moment reform was the currency of Irish kingship — and it permanently deprived his Eóganacht rivals of their ancient royal seat by turning it into a cathedral. In 1111 Cashel became one of only two archiepiscopal seats in the country. There was certainly a large church here by then. Not a stone of it survives; it probably stood where the east end of the 13th-century choir is now.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Hall of the Vicars Choral

You come in through it, so start here rather than hurrying past. Archbishop Richard O'Hedian (1406–1440) endowed the vicars choral with land and built them this two-storey hall — the hall first, the dormitory to the east slightly later. The vicars choral were the men, lay and clerical, appointed to sing the cathedral services. Cashel had eight of them originally, with their own seal; later that shrank to five honorary vicars who appointed singing-men as deputies, a dodge that ran until 1836. The upper floor was their living room, with a big fireplace in the south wall, and it has been restored with a timber gallery at the west end. It is the only surviving choir's residence in Ireland. The OPW re-roofed it in 1975 for European Architectural Heritage Year, and excavated and restored the dormitory in the 1980s.

Before you go in, walk round to the outside of the east wall and look high up. There is an exhibitionist sheela-na-gig up there, set on its side.

St Patrick's Cross

The high cross standing between the hall and the cathedral is a replica; the original 12th-century cross, over seven feet of it, is in the undercroft of the Vicars Choral, indoors and out of the weather. Go and look at the real one, because it is strange. Irish high crosses have a ring. This one does not: it is a plain Latin cross, which probably reflects European influence arriving in Ireland in the early 1100s. It had a subsidiary support at each side of the shaft, of which one survives — some read those as structural, others as a frame around the figures. There is a crucified Christ in a full-length robe on one face and a cleric on the other. And the base was once elaborately carved, apparently with a minotaur in a labyrinth on its north face.

The round tower

The oldest building on the Rock, and it may go right back to the handover in 1101. It stands 28 metres and it is complete to its conical stone cap, which is rare. The doorway is 3.7 metres off the ground, and the reason is structural rather than defensive: round towers were built on foundations about a metre deep, and lifting the door kept the walls stiff. Inside there were wooden floors joined by ladders, lit by small lintelled windows, with four triangular-headed windows evenly spaced round the bell floor at the top.

Two things worth knowing. The tower was built dry, without mortar — modern conservators have since grouted parts of it for safety. And the old story that round towers were refuges from the Vikings does not hold up: a building with one door and a timber interior is a death-trap, not a keep. In 1965 lightning struck this one and blew a large hole in it, which the OPW repaired.

Cormac's Chapel

This is the reason to come, and it is the one part of the site you cannot simply walk into.

Cormac Mac Cárthaigh, king of Desmond, built it between 1127 and 1134, and it does not look Irish. It has a nave and chancel with a tower projecting at the east end of each side wall of the nave — twin towers, a Germanic arrangement otherwise unknown in Ireland, and the explanation is on record: Dirmicius, the Irish Abbot of Regensburg, sent two of his carpenters over to help. Outside and in there are string courses and blind arcading, which is not how Irish churches were built either. It contains the oldest stairs in Ireland.

Over each of the two multi-ordered doorways is a carved animal. The south tympanum is probably an ox. The north tympanum is a small centaur in a Norman-type helmet, shooting a large lion with a bow and arrow. That doorway is the grander of the two and originally faced onto open ground; the 13th-century cathedral was later built up against it, so the best door in Romanesque Ireland now opens onto a wall.

Inside, the chancel arch is four orders deep, with finely carved pillars and capitals, and the second order from the outside carries a run of stone heads — human faces mixed with grotesques that are part animal, part person. Nobody knows what they were for. They are all over the chapel, inside and out. The arch also keeps a good deal of its original 12th-century paintwork.

The chancel ceiling is divided into four triangular fields, and all four carry traces of fresco, most likely the story of the Magi. There is a substantial fragment of a Baptism of Christ on the south wall, and haloed figures elsewhere in the chancel. These are the only surviving Romanesque wall paintings in Ireland. Between 1986 and 1997 conservators removed layers of calcified late-medieval limewash from them with scalpels.

At the west end of the nave stands an ornate stone sarcophagus, cut from a single block and covered on its damaged front panel with intertwined beasts and snakes in the Scandinavian Urnes style. It is thought to be the tomb of Tadgh Mac Cárthaigh, Cormac's brother. It is one of only seventeen identified sarcophagi in Ireland and the oldest to survive, and although it is roughly contemporary with the chapel it was moved here from the cathedral in 1875.

One puzzle to look for while you are in there: the chancel is set off-centre to the nave, and nobody has satisfactorily explained why.

Why you need a tour. The chapel is built of sandstone, which has soaked up water for nine centuries and taken the paintings with it. The building had to be enclosed in a rainproof structure and dried out from inside. Between 2009 and 2017 the OPW and the Perry Lithgow Partnership treated mould with UV germicidal light, installed controlled ventilation to hold the moisture down, repaired and restored the high stone roof and fitted guttering to throw rainwater clear of the facade. Tobit Curteis Associates monitor it continuously. Numbers inside are capped because every visitor exhales water. That is the actual reason, and it makes the restriction easier to accept when you are told there is no space on the 11 o'clock.

The cathedral

A large aisleless cruciform Gothic church, built somewhere around 1230 to 1270 — and it is worth saying that no record of its construction survives at all, so that date range is architectural guesswork rather than documented fact. It was fitted, ingeniously, into the space left between the round tower, Cormac's Chapel and a rock-cut well.

Read the building by its stone. All the original carved work in the choir is sandstone; the fine carving in the later parts is limestone. Once you notice, the phases separate themselves.

In the choir, tall lancets on the north and south walls with small quatrefoils above them, in keeping with a building of the 1230s; only the lower part of the east gable survives, where the high altar stood. In the south wall, working from the east, you get the piscina, where the sacred vessels were washed, then the damaged sedilia, where the clergy sat during Mass — and then the wall tomb of Miler Magrath.

Magrath is worth a paragraph. Born around 1523, a Franciscan, ordained a Catholic priest, appointed Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor by Rome in 1565 — and then, having conformed to the reformed faith in 1567, appointed Protestant Archbishop of Cashel in 1571 while Rome had still not deprived him of his Catholic see. He held both at once for nine years. He married a Catholic, had nine children, remarried after her death, complained that Cashel was worth only £98, collected other bishoprics to make up the difference, arrested some Catholic clergy and protected others including his own cousin, and died in his hundredth year in 1622 after fifty-two years as a bishop. A Franciscan poet wrote a satire pointing out that his name, Maolmhuire, means servant of Mary, and that he had earned the version Maol gan Mhuire — servant without Mary. Protestant and Catholic historians have been equally rude about him ever since.

15 September 1647

Magrath had been dead twenty-five years when the worst day in the Rock's history arrived. On 15 September 1647, during the Irish Confederate Wars, Murrough O'Brien — then Baron Inchiquin, later 1st Earl — brought Parliamentarian forces against Cashel. Defenders and townspeople had taken shelter inside the cathedral and refused to surrender. His troops came in with firebrands and ladders, and something in the order of a thousand people, soldiers and civilians together, were killed. The Catholic clergy were killed with them, among them Theobald Stapleton, who had published the first Irish catechism in Roman type. Much of what was portable and sacred was looted or destroyed. O'Brien carried the Irish name Murchadh na dTóiteán — Murrough of the Burnings — for the rest of his life and after it.

The thing to hold on to, standing in the roofless choir, is that the building survived this. It was repaired, and the Church of Ireland went on worshipping here for another century, until an archbishop decided otherwise.

The transepts each have two side chapels, and the two in the south transept are noticeably shallower than their opposite numbers — because Cormac's Chapel was already standing there and there was nowhere to put them. There are significant remains of 15th-century wall paintings on the east wall of the south transept, a Crucifixion, and they are quite separate from the famous ones in Cormac's Chapel; hardly anyone mentions them. The crossing arches are original 13th-century work on clustered banded columns with ornate capitals, though the plain ribbed vault in the middle was largely rebuilt in 1875. The tower above and the parapets are part of a 15th-century remodelling.

The nave is oddly short. The 13th-century plan almost certainly meant it to be longer, with the north and south doorways halfway along it. What happened is that a five-storey residential tower house was driven into the whole west end in the 15th century, and the walls were rebuilt around it. The groin-vaulted porch is the main entrance; there was a matching one on the north side and it has gone.

The graveyard, and Scully's Cross

The plateau is walled, and the graveyard scattered across it holds a number of high crosses and a good many weathered medieval slabs. The largest monument is Scully's Cross, put up in 1860 for the Scully family. In 1976 lightning struck a metal rod that ran the whole height of it and destroyed it; the top now lies on the ground at the base of its own stump, against the wall. It is the second thing on this hill that lightning has taken.

Hore Abbey, in the field below

Walk down. It is free, it is nearly always empty, and the view back up at the Rock from beside it is the one on the postcards.

The name probably comes from iubhair, yew. Archbishop David Mac Cerbaill professed the Cistercian rule in 1269 while remaining archbishop, and founded the abbey from Mellifont in 1270 — the last Cistercian house founded in Ireland before the Dissolution. He endowed it generously with land and mills that had belonged to the town, entered it himself, and was buried there in 1289. The story the guides tell — that he expelled the Benedictines after dreaming they meant to kill him — is almost certainly not true; it more likely grew out of his genuinely aggressive interference in the commerce of Cashel. He was a difficult man who quarrelled with his dean, his fellow bishops and the Dublin administration; thirty-eight local brewers objected formally to his levy of two flagons from every brewing, and two visiting monks were murdered in the town. The abbey was dissolved in 1540 and its property went to the Earl of Ormond; Elizabeth I granted the lands to Sir Henry Radcliffe in 1561.

One architectural oddity to notice: the cloister is on the north side, which is unusual among Irish Cistercian houses. The likeliest explanation is that the Rock is immediately north, and they did not want to turn their back on it.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The centaur on the north tympanum Cormac's Chapel, over the grander of the two doorways: a centaur in a Norman helmet shooting a lion with a bow. Now facing a wall, because the cathedral was built against it.
• The sarcophagus West end of the chapel nave. Urnes-style beasts and snakes cut from a single block, probably for Cormac's brother, and the oldest surviving sarcophagus in Ireland.
• The real St Patrick's Cross Indoors, in the undercroft of the Vicars Choral. No ring, a robed Christ on one face, and a minotaur in a labyrinth on the base.
• The sheela-na-gig High on the outside of the east wall of the Hall of the Vicars Choral, lying on its side. Nobody points it out.
• The 15th-century Crucifixion East wall of the south transept, in the roofless cathedral — a completely separate set of wall paintings from the famous ones next door.
• Miler Magrath's wall tomb South wall of the choir, past the piscina and sedilia. Catholic bishop and Protestant archbishop simultaneously for nine years.
• Scully's Cross Destroyed by lightning in 1976 down a metal rod running its full height. The top is lying at the foot of the stump.
• Hore Abbey Free, five minutes downhill, almost always empty, and the best view of the Rock there is.

Insider tips

Ring ahead if the forecast is bad. This is not ordinary Irish-weather advice: the OPW warns that the site is extremely exposed and subject to closure at short notice, and asks visitors to contact the site in bad weather and watch its social media for closure notices.

Bring a windproof layer whatever the forecast. The Rock stands well above the plain and catches weather the town below does not.

Walk down to Hore Abbey and turn round. The classic photograph of the Rock — ruins on a crag above open country — is taken from that field, and it costs nothing.

There is more medieval Cashel than the Rock. Dominic's Friary lies just to the south and was founded at about the same time as the cathedral; Kearney's Castle in the town is a late-15th-century tower house that later became a hotel; and Cashel Palace, at the foot of the Rock, is a hotel now. Archbishop Theophilus Bolton commissioned it from Edward Lovett Pearce around 1730 and it was finished in 1732; a private path called the Bishop's Walk still links its garden to the Rock. Arthur Price inherited both the palace and the cathedral from Bolton, and kept only one of them.

A last footnote on Price, and it is a good one. His land steward was a man called Richard Guinness. When Price died in 1752 he left £100 each to Richard and to Richard's 27-year-old son Arthur. Arthur Guinness opened his first brewery at Leixlip in 1755 and took the lease at St James's Gate in 1759. The archbishop who unroofed the Rock of Cashel helped fund the founding of Guinness.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Cashel has a good range of B&Bs, guesthouses and a few hotels within walking distance of the Rock, and enough cafes and pubs on the main street to make an overnight stop worthwhile rather than a rushed stop on the Dublin–Cork run. Staying the night also lets you see the Rock floodlit, which is worth the detour on its own.

More Irish churches

• Skellig Michael — a very different early medieval religious site: a monastery on a wave-battered Atlantic island rather than a hilltop.
• Kylemore Abbey — a Victorian castle turned Benedictine abbey in Connemara, centuries younger than Cashel.
• Christ Church Cathedral — Dublin's oldest cathedral, with its own famous medieval crypt.
• St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin — the National Cathedral of the Church of Ireland, and Swift's church.

See all the Irish churches in this guide →