These pages link Errill (Co. Laois) with Limerick City & Environs via:
Templetuohy & Moyne (Co. Tipperary / East)
Templetuohy (Teampall Tuaithe) is a village in Moyne-Templetuohy, a parish taking in several small communities, notably Lisheen.
Lisheen Castle
Lisheen Castle an C18th building converted into a mock-medieval castle between 1803 and 1820, takes its name (“little fortress”) from the nearby ruins of a stronghold originally erected by the Butlers of Ormond.
The “modern” edifice belonged for much of its history to the Lloyd family, some members of which helped out locally during the Great Famine, while others are recalled as ruthless and hard-hearted landlords, quick to evict without mercy. Lisheen Estate was the object of National Land League agitation against high rents, and several ejectment orders were successfully resisted by tenants mobilised by the local parish priest, Fr William Power.
The Lloyds had begun to emigrate overseas from about 1850 onwards, and economic depression in the last third of the C19th century saw most move to Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand, while the property passed by marriage to the O’Meara family. However, some Lloyd descendants still live in the area.
Lisheen was one of several Big Houses in the county burned down in 1921; it was said of the young IRA arsonists, who evicted the tenant in occupation before setting the place alight, claiming they thought the military was going to occupy it, that “they probably wanted to make a bonfire as big as the others fellows.”
Claims that the ruins were haunted arose from a confusion between this castle and another building with a similar name in County Sligo. As a correspondent has pointed out, the Bronze Age cremation sites on the grounds of County Tipperary’s Lisheen Castle are far more interesting than the hokey ghost stories to be found on the Internet.
In the 1990s the derelict castle shell was bought and fully restored by Joan and Michael Everard, descended from former Lloyd tenants, who live in the old Dower House of the estate (a fortified manor house occupied by the Lloyds while the castle was under construction) and run a successful farm.
The opulently refurbished castle is now available for self-catering holiday rentals at prices ranging from €4000 to €5000 per week, with accommodation for up to 14 people.
The Judkin-Fitzgerald Baronetcy of Lisheen, County Tipperary in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom was granted in August 1801 to Col. Thomas Judkin-Fitzgerald (Uniacke) in acknowledgement of his role as High Sheriff of County Tipperary in suppressing the 1798 Rebellion. The title has been dormant since the death of Sir Joseph Capel Judkin-Fitzgerald, 4th Baronet in 1917.
Lisheen Mine is an important lead and zinc ore deposit.
The area is of great interest to archaeologists, who have found evidence of prehistoic and ancient communities and established that prosperous medieval residents enjoyed commercial links with the European mainland.
Moyne village has a medieval church surrounded by a rather bleak graveyard and an attractive tree-lined Main Street with a good pub.
Moyne is north of Twomileborris on ByRoute 7.
Castleiney & Loughmore (Co. Tipperary / North)
Castleiney / Castleleiney / Castlelyny (Caisleán Laighnaigh) is for some reason referred to locally to as the Washpen.
Loughmore (Luach Maigh – “the reward field”) (pop. 600) is an old village with an attractively restored water pump.
Loughmoe Court
Loughmoe Court / Castle, a ruined but nonetheless impressive C15th Tower House with an adjoining C17th mansion overlooking the River Suir, was long the seat of the descendants of Sir Hugh Purcell, Lord of Loughmoe, an Anglo-Norman who claimed both Plantagenet and Carolingian ancestry.
Richard Purcell was made Baron of Loughmoe in 1328 by James Butler, 1st Earl of Ormond, as Palatine lord of Tipperary. Theobald Purcell was one of the leaders of the 1641 Rebellion and fought with the Kilkenny Confederacy in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Nicholas Purcell, (a nephew of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde), whose title as Baron appears to have been raised to the Jacobite Peerage by King James II, for whom he raised a cavalry troop known as the “Yellow Horse”, acted a right-hand man to Patrick Sarsfield at the Battle of the Boyne and was a signatory to the 1691 Treaty of Limerick. The family are believed to have remained in precarious residence until c.1760.
The round-cornered tower has mural chambers in both end walls and the fourth storey was a fine hall set over the uppermost of two vaults. There are several interestingly carved fireplaces.
Nearby, a ruined church contains several Purcell monuments.
Loughmoe Court 2008 (Photo by Rigger30)
The ruins are on private land.
The English name of the village is a mis-Anglicisation of the Irish original, better rendered in the name of the castle. The origins are tied up in a curious legend involving a savage pair of wild boars; the story can be read here.
The vilage graveyard contains the mausoleum of brothers Daniel and William Cormack, hanged in 1858 for the murder of a land agent. They were widely held to have been the victims of injustice resulting, as the epitaph neutrally observes, from “false testimony procured through GOLD and terror, the action in their trial of JUDGE KEOGH, a man who considered personally, politically, religiously and officially was one of the monsters of mankind, and the verdict of a prejudiced, partisan packed perjured jury” which “gratified the appetite of a bigoted, exterminating and ascendancy caste by a judicial murder of the kind which lives bitterly and perpetually in a nation’s remembrance”
Loughmore is north of Thurles on ByRoute 7.