Ballinacarriga Castle & the Hurleys

A Sourced History — What the Records Say, Where the Stories Came From, and What Still Needs Proving

Compiled & annotated by Dave Hurley • Digital Edition, 2026 • Work in progress

Ballinacarriga Castle, Co. Cork
Ballinacarriga Castle, parish of Ballymoney, Co. Cork — the plate that opens the 1905 Cork Journal article.

About This History

Search for Ballinacarriga Castle and you will find the same short story told a dozen times: built by Randal Hurley in 1585, carved with his and his wife Catherine's initials, forfeited after 1641, passed to the Crofts. Almost none of those tellings say where the story came from. This history takes the opposite approach. Each source that says anything substantial about the castle gets its own section: what it actually says, where its author got the information, and how far it can be trusted. The disputed questions are then taken up one at a time, with the evidence laid side by side.

Throughout, every claim is placed in one of three layers — documented (contemporary records and the building itself), interpretation (historians and archaeologists reading that evidence), and tradition (family and local lore, however old or often repeated). Section 1 explains the method and shows how the familiar sources depend on one another.

This history is a companion to the annotated transcription of Some Account of the Family of O'Hurly (JCHAS, 1905–06), which is cited here often and is not repeated.

Part I — The Castle and the Question

  1. Introduction & Method: One Castle, Many Retellings
  2. The Castle as Evidence: Fabric, Date Stone & Carvings

Part II — The Sources, in Order

  1. Jobson's Map of Munster (c. 1584)
  2. The Fiants of Elizabeth: the Pardons of July 1584
  3. The Fair Patent of 1615
  4. The Bandon Inquisition of 1631
  5. Outlawry at Youghal (1642), the Down Survey & the Book of Distribution
  6. The Dublin Penny Journal (1834)
  7. Lewis's Topographical Dictionary (1837)
  8. D'Alton's King James's Irish Army List (1855)
  9. Bennett's History of Bandon (1862; enlarged 1869)
  10. The Cork Journal: Some Account of the Family of O'Hurly (1905–06)
  11. Healy's Notebooks & the Schools' Collection (c. 1937–38)
  12. Collins in the Cork Journal (1951)
  13. Samuel's Survey & the Modern Accounts (1998–present)

Part III — The Disputed Questions

  1. Who Built It, and When?
  2. Hurley or McCarthy? — Lewis's “Randal McCarty”
  3. Randal's Family: Parents, Wife & Children (and the Other Randal of Kilmallock)
  4. Dashwood or Crofts? The Forfeiture Reconsidered
  5. The Chapel Years: Mass in the Castle until 1815 — or 1843?

Part IV — Tradition, Timeline & Aids

  1. The Legends: Tally Sticks, the Seven Sons & Crohoore a Gunna
  2. A Sourced Timeline, c. 1500–1850
  3. Citing Randal Oge Hurley: A Guide for Family-Tree Profiles
  4. Bibliography & Links to Digitized Sources