Introduction & the Castle of Ballinacarriga (p. 105) — Some Account of the Family of O'Hurly

Ballinacarriga Castle, Co. Cork, 1905 photograph — Ballinacarriga Castle, Co. Cork (1905) — the plate immediately preceding the article in the original Journal.

This opening page is the unnamed 1905 author's own introduction, explaining how the article came about: a August 1896 field visit to Ballinacarriga Castle with the late Herbert Webb Gillman, family papers lent by J. C. D. Hurly of Fenit, and the plan to trace the Knocklong, Co. Limerick branch of the family first.

Page 105

One of the objects of the Cork Historical and Archæological Society is to give the history of Cork from its ancient castles and other antiquities. The castle of Ballinacarriga, built by Randal Hurly, which belonged to that family, attracted the attention of the Society, and I was invited to join the late Mr. Herbert Webb Gillman and others to give a description of this castle, which was evidently of great importance from its size and also from the curious stone carvings it contains. In August, 1896, Mr. Gillman, with his daughter, Miss Frances Gillman, now Mrs. Ievers, of Glenduff Castle, Co. Limerick, and I went to the castle and took measurements of it, and also took notes describing it, which were to be published jointly by Mr. Gillman and the writer of this article. Besides these notes, Mr. Gillman looked up the Fiants of Elizabeth and Charles I., from which he compiled, as he describes, much history. He finds that the O'Hurly family are originally from Limerick, where they were in possession of their tribal lands. In this sense, Limerick is the home or seat of the family, and to give a history of the castle, Mr. Gillman justly writes, we must begin first with the history of the family in the County Limerick. In my researches I discovered that Mr. J. C. D. Hurly, of Fenit, Tralee, had valuable documents connected with the history of the family. I put myself in communication with him, and he kindly lent me the materials at his disposal. The family of the late Mr. Gillman also gave me his notes, and in compiling this article it is almost entirely due to the notes and documents I have got from these two sources. The first portion of this article will deal with the County Limerick (Knocklong) branch, head of the family of Hurly or Hurley, the pedigree, distinguished members of the family, wills, confiscations, &c., relating to its history.

The article opens with a decorated drop-capital "O" in the original printing, restored here as a plain initial. Original spelling and punctuation are otherwise preserved; obvious printer's errors are corrected silently. A small "9" printed at the foot of the original page is a printer's gathering/signature mark, not article text, and is omitted here, as with all such marks throughout this series.

Historical Note — Ballinacarriga Castle

Ballinacarriga is a tower house near Dunmanway, West Cork, traditionally dated to about 1585 and associated with Randal Hurley (Hurly) and his wife Catherine Cullinane, whose initials and a carved inscription appear inside. It is best known today for surviving painted plasterwork ceilings and carved panels depicting religious and heraldic scenes — the "curious stone carvings" the author mentions, including a Crucifixion scene and Arma Christi (Instruments of the Passion) panels dated to 1585 by an accompanying inscription. The castle still stands as a ruin and is a protected national monument, distinct from the Knocklong branch the article goes on to trace in County Limerick; Ballinacarriga represents a separate, later Cork branch of the same family name.

The top floor bearing these carvings was very likely built as the Hurley family's own private chapel from the outset, and it went on to serve a wider purpose after the Reformation and under the Penal Laws, when public Catholic worship was restricted: a cited older local-history source states that "up to 1815, (when the chapel of Ballinacarrig was built,) divine service was performed for a series of years in the hall of the castle," adding that "there is a strong local tradition that that was, indeed, the case." So the castle appears to have functioned as the effective parish church for the area for some considerable stretch of time before a permanent chapel was finally built nearby in 1815. We have not been able to confirm more specific and colorful details sometimes repeated about this period — such as a tradition of locals sweeping out the ruin weekly so a priest could say Mass there, or an exact date the Hurleys lost the castle — and treat those as unverified local tradition rather than documented fact.

Historical Note — Herbert Webb Gillman

Gillman was a Vice-President of the Cork Historical and Archæological Society and a frequent contributor to its Journal; another notice in this same 1905 volume records his recent death. This article's unnamed author presents the piece explicitly as completing work Gillman had left unfinished at his death, built on the 1896 field visit the two made together and on Gillman's research into the Elizabethan and Caroline "Fiants" (see glossary below). Gillman is mentioned again later in this series; later mentions will only add new context rather than repeating this note.

Historical Note — J. C. D. Hurly of Fenit

John Charles Denis Hurly (b. 1864) was the head of the Fenit branch of the family at the time this article was written — a landed proprietor and magistrate who served as High Sheriff of County Kerry in 1888, confirmed independently in the county's own list of High Sheriffs. He was the son of John Hurly of Fenit House (who died in October 1878) and Elizabeth Augusta, widow of William Dundas Boyd and daughter of Colquhoun Grant of Kinchurdy, Morayshire; he had two sisters, Ellinor Mary and Augusta Hobart Hurly. The wider Hurly family of Kerry — holding Fenit House, Bridge House in Tralee, Glenduff, Shanvally, Fortwilliam, and Ballyhenry — was a substantial landed estate, recorded at over 11,000 acres in the county by the 1870s.

Lending family papers to outside researchers ran in the family: an earlier Hurly of Fenit House (almost certainly J. C. D.'s father) had already lent an old family manuscript to the historian Mary Agnes Hickson for her Selections from Old Kerry Records in the early 1870s, decades before J. C. D. did the same for this article's author in 1905. Fenit House itself eventually passed out of J. C. D.'s hands to his sister Augusta Hobart Hurly, who held it until her death in 1946.

Glossary

Fiants: Warrants issued under the Great Seal of Ireland instructing that a grant, pardon, or appointment be drawn up as a formal patent. Chancery kept the warrants (the "fiants," from the Latin fiant literae patentes, "let letters patent be made") even where the resulting patents themselves were later lost, making the surviving Tudor-era fiants — especially those of Elizabeth I, which Gillman consulted — one of the richest surviving sources for sixteenth-century Irish landholding, pardons, and family names.