King John's Castle is full of historic tales of Irish suffering at the hands of English oppression. Photo / Supplied
Disembowelments, flaming pigs and explosive poo: these are the curious tales behind the ghostly ghouls of King John’s Castle in Ireland, writes Derek Cheng
The scream erupted from nowhere and shattered the silence of the ancient room on the castle’s first floor, as if someone was being disemboweled.
We’d just learned the fate of the room’s former occupant, Captain George Courtenay, who was hung from his own intestines in his quarters in King John’s Castle, Ireland, in the 17th century after the derailing of his evil plan to kill his own soldiers.
To avoid paying them, as our castle guide Mike Casey explained, the English military leader had written a note telling his Irish foes where the soldiers would be at a certain time, and to please kill them. As if to tempt fate, he decided it would be deliciously devilish to pass the note to the soldiers so they could deliver themselves to their own fate.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they opened the letter, didn’t particularly like what it said, and decided not only to slice open the captain and hang him from the ceiling by his own intestines, but to leave him rotting in elevated humiliation. His daughter found what was left of him six days later. Distraught with grief and traumatised by the sight, she flung herself into the River Shannon below.
This is one of the frightful fables etched into the walls of the countless medieval relics of Ireland, a country similar to New Zealand with an oversized love of rugby, a huge expat population, and four-seasons-in-one-day weather amid rolling green hills full of sheep and cattle.
But Ireland’s rich history stretches back much further, from its first human inhabitants some 30,000 years ago to the patchwork of kingdoms that existed around the time of its most famous son, Saint Patrick, in the fifth century.
This was followed by invasions from the Vikings, the Normans, and eventually the English, the latter a struggling relationship that’s summed up among the Irish as “700 years of oppression!”
The remnants of this history are everywhere, from ancient stone walls scattered throughout the countryside to hilltop churches to, oddly, a castle wall in the middle of a coastal golf course.
The ruins of a Protestant church, for example, are pleasantly stumbled upon during a walkabout in the town of Ennistymon, where your gaze is drawn to the hill overlooking the quaint borough.
Built in 1778, the church is now roofless and cloaked in lush patches of luminous leaves, which seem to have consumed the roof and are now slowly devouring the stone walls. The whole scene, including the surrounding graveyard, is delightfully haloed in an eerie eminence.
And then there’s the famous golfing links of the aptly named Castle Course, on the Lahinch coast. Next to the tee-off for the seventh hole is the last remaining wall of Dough Castle, its fragility due to sandy foundations more than the scars of battle.
Early morning is the best time to ponder all that the castle, originally built in 1306, might have witnessed over the centuries, and how much longer its final wall will stay upright.
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King John’s Castle, in Limerick, is perhaps Ireland’s greatest symbol of English oppression. Built at around 1200 on the backs of Irish slave labour for the King - John was the ruler of England and Lord of Ireland - the imposing fortification was meant to protect the city from the Gaelic kingdoms to the west and rebellious Norman leaders to the east and south.
Its proximity alongside the River Shannon made it a natural site for settlement; indeed, the castle was literally built on top of remnants of a Viking village, dating back to the year 922, which they used as a base to raid other settlements along the river.
Those preserved remains aren’t far from the underground tunnels that played a critical role in various sieges of the castle in the 17th century, as the English and Irish fought for control of the city.
The tunnels were an attempt to undermine the foundations of a castle wall in a particularly novel but horrifying manner: pigs were tarred, set alight with a flaming torch, and let loose into the tunnel where it was hoped they would combust, thereby weakening the wall.
A central part of the castle tour seemed to revolve around the ghosts that continue to haunt the premises. This all started when our guide led us up a narrow, spiralling stairwell to the castle towers, which are said to be disturbed by the wraiths of Captain George and his daughter - among others.
The telling of their gruesome ends did not provoke the aforementioned scream, but it laid the groundwork. One of our group of touring journalists had turned her focus to snapping a photo. Turning to leave the room, a sudden apparition in the corner of her eye elicited the most blood-curdling sound.
Her scream echoed around the stone walls before it was swallowed by raucous laughter. The apparition - another of the journalists in the group - had no intentions of disembowelment. But he was perhaps hovering a tad too closely and too silently in an effort to detect any sign of the daughter’s sobbing, which can apparently be heard if you squint your ears.
Another more disturbing sign of their afterlife, Casey told us, related to George’s insistence on leaving the door to his room in one of the castle’s lofty towers open.
The door has been heard slamming open, apropos of nothing. It’s also supposedly been found ajar the morning after it was padlocked shut the night before. And one time, the ghost of George made a bit of a statement: the door was once found lying on the floor, having been pulled from its hinges.
In the castle courtyard, Casey pointed to another tower that was also haunted, this time by a demonic Irish banshee whose crying lamentations - “either a beautiful woman singing or a haggard woman wailing” - can also supposedly be heard.
And then there’s the infamous tale of the nearby Thomond Bridge, a stone’s throw from George’s quarters, where the intertwined lives of a bishop’s lady and a drunken man named Thady have become the subject of a famous Limerick poem (though not in the syncopated rhythms of poetry for which the city is famous).
“Spending the Reverend Lordship’s treasure, chasing the world’s evil treasure,” so the poem goes, the bishop’s lady was murdered and thrown from the bridge. Drunken Thady, whose sinful life resembled hers, was crossing the bridge in a tippled stupor one evening when her ghost grabbed him by his stumbling ankles and tried to drag him to the icy waters below. But his final, desperate prayer to be spared was answered, and thereafter he lived a life of sober purity.
Or so the story goes.
Whether there’s any kernel of truth to any of these tales hardly matters. They have become such fables of fascination that entire TV episodes have been devoted to the paranormal activities in and around the castle grounds.
It’s a wonder the large pit bordering the opposite end of the courtyard has no spiritual hangover from the castle’s violent past. With no dungeon to leave enemies to rot, they were thrown into a pit deep enough to break a leg. If they survived, doors to the adjacent river could be opened to drown them in tidal water.
Today the courtyard is a family friendly affair with games like tug of war, ancient cannonballs to test your shot-putting prowess, and a harp player dressed in traditional garb to supposedly give you a sense of what a typical day might have been like in times of peace and prosperity; the castle was a thriving centre for trade and commerce, thanks to its river access. King John, who may not have ever visited the castle, was so rich that he had his own coins minted in the castle.
His demise seemed to reflect something else in the castle’s history: everyone was eventually confronted with their rightful comeuppance.
Considered particularly sadistic and murderous, King John’s rule was the catalyst for the Magna Carta, stripping the monarch of absolute power. His death, in 1216, was considered a fitting end: he died of dysentery.
Or, as Casey liked to put it, of “explosive diarrhoea”.
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to Dublin with one stopover with Qatar Airways, Emirates and Air NZ (with Aer Lingus). The drive time from Dublin to Limerick is approx. 2 hours, 15 minutes.
DETAILS
tourismireland.com, tourismni.com
Derek Cheng travelled to Ireland courtesy of Tourism Ireland, Tourism Northern Ireland and Fáilte Ireland.
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