Rock of Cashel

The Rock of Cashel rises abruptly out of the flat farmland of County Tipperary, a limestone outcrop crowned with a ruined cathedral, a round tower and a small Romanesque chapel, all packed together within a single wall. From miles away it reads as one silhouette, part castle and part church, and close up it holds some of the most important medieval architecture in Ireland.

Long before the churches, this was a seat of power: the kings of Munster ruled from Cashel from early times, and Brian Boru was crowned here in 977. Local tradition gives the rock a more colourful origin — it is said to be a mouthful of stone spat out by the Devil when Saint Patrick drove him from a gap in the mountains to the north, the Devil's Bit, and Patrick himself is said to have converted the King of Munster here in the fifth century. In 1101 King Muirchertach Ua Briain gave the fortress to the Church, and from then on Cashel became an ecclesiastical centre.

The oldest standing structure is the round tower, about 28 metres high and built around 1100 of dry-stone construction, still complete after nine centuries. Beside it stands the jewel of the site, Cormac's Chapel, begun in 1127 and consecrated in 1134: a compact church with a steep stone roof, two square towers flanking the junction of nave and chancel, chevron-carved arches and blind arcades, and inside it the only surviving Romanesque frescoes in Ireland, faint but precious. The great cathedral, raised between about 1235 and 1270, is an aisleless Gothic cross with a central tower; it lost its roof in the eighteenth century, when an archbishop chose to abandon it, and its open nave and lancet windows now frame the sky. The fifteenth-century Hall of the Vicars Choral, the residence of the cathedral's choir clergy, has been restored and shelters the original St Patrick's Cross, a high cross more than two metres tall.

The rock also carries darker memory: in 1647, during the Confederate Wars, Parliamentarian troops under Lord Inchiquin stormed the rock and massacred the soldiers, townspeople and clergy — by most accounts around a thousand — who had taken refuge inside the cathedral. Walk around the outside of the walls among the graveyard's high crosses, and look down across the fields to the Cistercian ruins of Hore Abbey at its foot, for the view that makes the rock's setting so memorable. The site is managed by the Office of Public Works.

Getting there

The rock stands on the edge of the town of Cashel, County Tipperary; Clonmel (Cluain Meala) is about 22 km to the south. The nearest airport is Cork International Airport (ORK), about 86 km away.