About
Carlow Castle stands at the meeting of the rivers Barrow and Burren in Carlow town, built between 1208 and 1213 and attributed to William Marshal, often called the greatest knight that ever lived. It belongs to a small group of four-towered keeps with Ferns, Lea and the original Kilkenny Castle: a rectangular block with cylindrical drum towers at each corner and cross-shaped arrow loops, its walls 2.7 metres thick, with the entrance at first-floor level and a third storey added in the late fourteenth century for the Irish Exchequer. Cromwell seized it in 1650. Its explosive past came in 1814, when Dr Philip Parry Middleton used blasting powder to enlarge the building for a lunatic asylum and brought down the eastern half, leaving only the two western drum towers and the wall between them. Storm Ciara damaged the ruin in 2020; the OPW stabilised it and reopened the site in 2021. The castle is free and open-air, seen from the path around its grassy mound with information boards.
Open in daylightFrom OPW Heritage Ireland's published times
- Open any reasonable time in daylight
Opening times may change at short notice.
An unguided open-air national monument in OPW's care with no published hours, no staff and no facilities; the ruin is viewed from the path and grass around its mound, where information boards with drawings tell its history, and OPW does not say whether the interior can be entered. OPW warns that care and caution should be kept throughout a visit to its unguided sites.
No toilets on site; the town's facilities are a short walk away.
Photo: The west wall of Carlow Castle between its two surviving drum towers, under a blue sky. Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carlow_Castle_W_2009_09_03.jpg. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0. Resized and cropped for display; derivatives retain the source licence.
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