🏰 Cashel, County Tipperary

The Rock the Devil Dropped

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

Drive through Tipperary and the land is flat for miles.

Then a rock stands up out of it, with a whole town of ruins on top.

Nothing else in Ireland looks like it. Here is why it is there.

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 is what the rock itself says, if you know how to read it. Both are worth having.

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 rock’s own answer. 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.

The legend: one bite, one throw, one rock. Tap the button to see what the rock says instead.

Here is the good bit. The two answers can be tested against each other. The Devil’s Bit mountain is made of sandstone. The Rock of Cashel is limestone. Different rock entirely. So the chunk that is missing from the mountain cannot be the lump sitting at Cashel, however good the story is.

Keep the story anyway. It is a better story than “erosion”, and now you know which one is true.

A big rock on a flat plain is the best seat in the house.

You can see anyone coming for a day’s walk in every direction.

So, of course, kings moved in.

Part two

Five hundred years of kings

The name gives it away. 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 is 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). The story people tell about that day is a good one. Patrick carried a crozier, a tall staff with a metal spike on the bottom. During the ceremony he leaned on it, hard, and the spike went straight through the king’s foot. Aengus did not make a sound. Afterwards he said he thought it was part of the ceremony.

That story was written down long after it happened, so treat it as a story. What is certain is that from then on Cashel was a Christian place as well as a royal one.

Then, in 977, the Rock crowned the biggest name in Irish history. Brian Boru 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. Every Irish schoolbook has him. This is where he started.

A king, a saint, a spike, and a crowd that had no idea what they had just watched.

In 1101 a later king, Muirchertach O’Brien, did something clever with the Rock. He gave it away. He handed it to the Church. That sounds generous, and it was, but it also meant his rivals could never take it from him. If it belonged to God, nobody could sit on it.

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

Your turn

Build the Rock

Nothing you see up there today was built all at once. It went up over about four hundred years, one building at a time, and then one of them came partly down again. Drag the slider from left to right and watch it grow.

Before 1100

Just the rock. Kings have lived here for centuries, in wooden buildings that are all long gone. Nothing standing today is older than the next stop.

Part three

Three things to look for up there

The round tower. Twenty-eight metres tall, about as high as a nine-storey building, built around 1100, and still perfect after nine hundred years of Tipperary weather. Its door is high up 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. That tells you what it was for.

Cormac’s Chapel. Built between 1127 and 1134 by a king called Cormac MacCarthy. It is small, but it is the finest building on the Rock, and it hides something nobody knew about for hundreds of years. Inside, under layers of old whitewash, there are painted walls. Real paintings, from the 1100s. They are the only ones of their kind left in Ireland, and they were only found again in the 1980s. There is also a stone coffin in there, carved all over with tangled animals in a Viking style, which tells you who Ireland was trading with at the time.

The cathedral. The biggest thing on the Rock, built between 1235 and 1270, when a cathedral was the tallest, grandest thing most people would ever see. Look up at the walls and you will notice the obvious problem. There is no roof. Hold that question. It is the last part 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 is where you go in today.

Meanwhile

What else was going on

Dates on their own do not mean much. Dates next to other dates do. Tap a year from the Rock’s story and see what the rest of the world was doing.

Start at the beginning.

For five hundred years the Rock was a place of singing and stone.

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 and Protestants, king and parliament, everyone against everyone. An army loyal to the English parliament was marching through Munster, led by a man called Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin. The Irish had a nickname for him: Murrough of the Burnings. It was not a compliment.

When his army reached Cashel, the people of the town did what people had always done. They ran up the Rock, behind the walls, and into the cathedral. It was the strongest building for miles. Soldiers held the walls. Hundreds of ordinary people, priests, and children waited inside.

The walls did not hold. Inchiquin’s men 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 the exact number who died that day. The estimates run from five hundred to eight hundred people, and some say closer to a thousand.

The night of the 15th of September 1647, from the plain below.

The Rock had been a safe place for twelve hundred years. After that day, it never really was again. The church carried on using it for another century, but the town had learned something it could not unlearn.

Part five

The bishop who took the roof off

Now the question from earlier. Why does the biggest building on the Rock have no roof?

The answer is not a storm, or a war, or old age. It is a decision. In 1749 the Archbishop of Cashel, a man called Arthur Price, decided that the old cathedral on the Rock was too much bother. He had a newer church down in the town. So he had the roof stripped off the cathedral and left the rest to the weather.

The story people in Cashel tell is that his carriage could not make it up the steep hill, and he got tired of walking. Historians are not sure that is true. What is true is that once the roof was gone, the rain did the rest. Two hundred and seventy years of it.

One man who could not be bothered can finish off a building that stood for five hundred years.

Which is worth remembering about anything old that is still standing. Somebody, in every generation, has to decide to keep it.

A seabed. A fort. A saint’s spike. A crown.

A painted chapel. An army. A missing roof.

All of it on one rock, and the rock is still there.

Today

If you go

The Rock is looked after by the Office of Public Works now, and it is open all year. You go in through the vicars’ hall, and the first thing you see is the real St Patrick’s Cross, 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 they are there, and they are nine hundred years old. Then stand in the cathedral, with the sky where the roof should be, and you will know exactly who to blame.

And 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. Same shape, wrong rock. You know that now, and most of the people standing beside you do not.

Tell it back

Five moments. Tap one for a reminder, then tell the whole thing to someone in your own words.

Five pictures. One rock.