🏰 Cashel, County Tipperary

The Rock the Devil Dropped

This lump of limestone has seen a saint, a line of kings, one terrible day in 1647, and a bishop who took the roof off.

Drive through Tipperary and the land is flat for miles.

Then you see a huge rock on the plain, with a whole town of ruins on top.

Nothing else in Ireland looks like it.

Part one

How does a rock end up in the middle of a field?

There are two answers. One is a story people have told for over a thousand years. The other comes from what the rock is made of.

The story. About thirty kilometres north of Cashel there is a mountain with a big square notch bitten out of its top. It is called the Devil’s Bit. The story goes that St Patrick chased the Devil out of a cave up there. The Devil was so furious that he bit a chunk out of the mountain as he flew off, then spat it out as he crossed the plain. Where it landed is the Rock of Cashel.

The geology. Cashel is limestone. Limestone is made from the shells and skeletons of tiny sea creatures, piled up on the floor of a warm sea for millions of years and squeezed into stone. So the Rock was once a seabed. Ice and rain and rivers then wore away the softer ground around it over an enormous stretch of time, and this harder lump was left standing on its own.

In the legend, the Devil bites a chunk out of the mountain and spits it out at Cashel. Tap the button to see what the rock is really made of.

You can test the two answers against each other. The Devil’s Bit mountain is made of sandstone, and the Rock of Cashel is limestone. So the chunk missing from the mountain can’t be the rock at Cashel, however good the story is.

It’s a better story than “erosion”, but now you know which one is true.

From the top of a big rock on a flat plain, you can see for miles.

You’d spot anyone coming from a day’s walk away, in any direction.

That’s why kings chose to live there.

Part two

Five hundred years of kings

Cashel comes from the Irish caiseal (say: KASH-al), which means a stone fort. From around the year 400 the kings of Munster ruled from the top of this rock. Munster is the whole south of Ireland, so that’s a big job.

The most famous visitor came early. In the 400s, St Patrick climbed the Rock to baptise the king, a man called Aengus (say: ENG-us). There’s a famous story about that day. Patrick carried a crozier, a tall staff with a metal spike on the bottom. During the ceremony he leaned hard on it, and the spike went straight through the king’s foot. Aengus didn’t make a sound. Afterwards he said he’d thought it was part of the ceremony.

That story was written down long after it happened, so nobody knows if it’s true. What we do know is that from then on Cashel was a Christian place as well as a royal one.

In 977, Brian Boru, the biggest name in Irish history, was made King of Munster here. He went on to become High King of all Ireland, and died winning the Battle of Clontarf against the Vikings in 1014. He’s in every Irish schoolbook, and he started out here at Cashel.

St Patrick leans on his crozier beside the king, and the crowd has no idea what’s just happened.

In 1101 a later king, Muirchertach O’Brien, gave the Rock to the Church. That was generous, but it was also clever, because it meant his rivals could never take it from him. Once it belonged to the Church, no king could rule from it.

And from that day, the kings left and the builders arrived.

Your turn

Build the Rock

The buildings you can see today went up one at a time over about four hundred years, and then one of them partly came down again. Drag the slider from left to right to see them appear.

Before 1100

Just the rock. Kings have lived here for centuries, but their wooden buildings are long gone. Everything still standing today was built after this.

Part three

Three things to look for up there

The round tower. It’s twenty-eight metres tall, about as high as a nine-storey building. It was built around 1100, and it’s still in perfect shape after nine hundred years of Tipperary weather. Its door is high off the ground, well above your head. You needed a ladder to get in, and once you were in you pulled the ladder up after you, so nobody could follow.

Cormac’s Chapel. A king called Cormac MacCarthy built it between 1127 and 1134. It’s small, but it’s the finest building on the Rock. Inside, under layers of old whitewash, there are painted walls from the 1100s. Nobody knew they were there for hundreds of years, until they were found again in the 1980s, and they’re the only paintings of their kind left in Ireland. There’s also a stone coffin in there, carved all over with tangled animals in a Viking style, which shows who Ireland was trading with at the time.

The cathedral. It’s the biggest building on the Rock, built between 1235 and 1270, when a cathedral was the tallest, grandest thing most people would ever see. Look up and you’ll see it has no roof. You’ll find out why at the end of the story.

And the small hall at the front, from the 1400s, is the Hall of the Vicars Choral. The vicars choral were the men who sang the services in the cathedral, and this was their house. It’s where you go in today.

Meanwhile

What else was going on

A date is easier to picture when you know what else was happening at the same time. Tap a year from the Rock’s story to see what the rest of the world was doing.

Start at the beginning.

For five hundred years, the Rock was full of churches and singing.

Then, on the 15th of September 1647, an army came up the hill.

Part four

The worst day

In the 1640s Ireland and England were both at war with themselves. Catholics were fighting Protestants, and the king was fighting his own parliament. An army loyal to the English parliament was marching through Munster, led by a man called Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin. The Irish called him Murrough of the Burnings.

When his army reached Cashel, the people of the town did what people there had always done in danger. They ran up the Rock, behind the walls, and into the cathedral, the strongest building for miles. Soldiers guarded the walls, and hundreds of ordinary people, priests and children waited inside.

Inchiquin’s men got past the walls and broke in through the windows. The last sixty soldiers, up in the tower, were promised their lives if they surrendered. They came down and threw away their swords, and were killed anyway. Nobody knows exactly how many people died that day. Estimates run from five hundred to eight hundred, and some say it was closer to a thousand.

This is the Rock on the night of the 15th of September 1647, seen from the plain below.

The Rock had been a safe place for twelve hundred years, but after that day it never really was again. The church kept using it for another century.

Part five

The bishop who took the roof off

Now you’ll find out why the biggest building on the Rock has no roof.

In 1749 the Archbishop of Cashel, a man called Arthur Price, decided that the old cathedral on the Rock was too much bother, because he had a newer church down in the town. So he had the roof stripped off the cathedral and left the walls open to the weather.

People in Cashel say his carriage couldn’t get up the steep hill and he got tired of walking, but historians aren’t sure that’s true. Once the roof was gone, the rain got in, and it has been getting in for nearly two hundred and eighty years.

One archbishop’s decision ruined a building that had stood for five hundred years.

Old buildings are still standing today because people in every generation chose to look after them.

The Rock started out as the floor of a warm sea.

Then kings, saints, builders and an army all came up the hill.

All of that happened on one rock, and you can still go and stand on it.

Today

If you go

The Office of Public Works looks after the Rock now, and it’s open all year. You go in through the vicars’ hall, and the first thing you’ll see is the real St Patrick’s Cross, which has been moved indoors to keep it out of the rain. The one standing outside is a copy.

Go into Cormac’s Chapel and look up. The paintings are faint, but you can still see them, and they’re nine hundred years old. Then stand in the cathedral and look up at the open sky where the roof used to be.

On the way out, look north. On a clear day you can see the Devil’s Bit from the top of the Rock, notch and all.

Tell it back

Here are five big moments from the story. Tap one for a reminder, then tell the whole story to someone in your own words.

Tap a picture to start.